Jellyfish have human eyes

A special pair of eyes, similar to those of humans, helped venomous box jellyfish avoid crashing into obstacles while swimming through the sea floor.

Unlike ordinary jellyfish - which only drift by tidal currents, box jellyfish are active swimmers that can turn 180 degrees and skillfully poison venom between objects. Scientists think they are so clever because a couple of the 24 eyes found obstacles on the road.

"Behaviorally, they are very different from ordinary jellyfish , " said Anders Garm, the team leader from Lund University in Sweden.

The jellyfish's eyes are on cup-like structures suspended over their cubic bodies.

While people have only 1 pair of eyes for many purposes such as feeling color, size, shape and intensity of light, box jellyfish have 4 types of eyes for different purposes. The most primitive eyes detect the intensity of light, a more complex pair of eyes to recognize the color and shape of the object.

One of the upper eyes is at the top of the cup-shaped structure, and the other is at the bottom: they give the box jelly "an extremely fishy look, so it can observe most of the underwater world" , Garm said. When encountering different obstacles, the eyes helped the jellyfish avoid colliding with them.

Because jellyfish belong to one of the first evolutionary groups of animals, Garm said understanding how they work will allow scientists to know how to make eyes through evolutionary periods.

Box jellyfish (Photo: LiveScience)

T. An