Somewhere I've heard a cool idea that sleep might be the "default" state of the living organisms. Most of the time you want to rest and conserve energy, so sleeping is just how we are, it's waking up to get food and procreate is the "strange" thing we do.<p>No idea if this makes sense scientifically, but it's fun to think about.<p>Or maybe animals that walk around during the time when there's no light just get themselves into trouble more often and end up dying out of the gene pool. Might as well shut down during the dangerous time and use it for repair.
So what this may be telling us is that sleep is required for beings with nerve cells, rather than solely for those with concentrated and clearly defined brains. This would make sense. All animals with brains sleep, but diversity of brain configuration and design exhibited across all of these different animal species would indicate that there's no single aspect of a brain that demands sleep, and therefore sleep is not an emergent property of collections of neurons forming brains but something the neurons themselves demand in order to function.
Title is technically correct (the best kind of correct) but jellies do have a nervous system. Its a net if a few hundred neurons.<p>Here's to hoping this research helps is discover why we evolved to sleep.
What is even more interesting is why exactly do they "sleep" at night? Do they have some sort of circadian rhythm? They are filter feeders, so the time of the day should not be that important, after all they can filter feed at night? Maybe it is a byproduct of being in lab? Since they are fed during the daytime, they might have "adjusted" to the lab schedule? They need light though, for their photosynthesizing symbionts.
Not an expert on jellyfish physiology, but might there be a distinction between "a sleep-like state" and being plain "tired"? After doing some physical activity animals tend to need some rest. Exhaustion is much less of an exciting phenomenon than sleep is.
The researchers lost sleep to research sleep.<p>A follow-up question I'd like to see researched is jet lag. Why do the jellyfish sleep during those hours? Can they adjust their circadian rhythm to a different time zone?
In my humble opinion every animal consistent of multiple cells alive on this planet developed sleep for just one reason: the very same reason plants sleep. Our planet has a night phase and without sun little energy is left. So as a consequence the best one can do is to clean up internal processes or go into some sort of energy saving mode. Ofc this is heretic to some individuals...<p>But Ockham's razor tells me I'm right.
> “When you start working on something totally crazy, it's good to get data before you tell anybody,” Abrams said.<p>It's too bad that this seems to be the environment that our up-and-coming generation of scientists operate in.
Moderators: the title should be changed to the actual article title, which is:<p>"Scientists just discovered the first brainless animal that sleeps"<p>The submitted title, "Scientists just discovered the first animal without a brain that sleeps", is ambiguous. In addition to the correct meaning, it could also have meant the first animal whoe brain does not sleep.
spoiler: it's merely the avatar of a 4th dimensional eldritch horror and is actually studying the scientists before treating our realm as a cheap buffet.