Kiel, Germany: A species of jellyfish called the Caribbean Box doesn’t need a brain to learn like other animals.

A recent experiment found that despite having no brain, the Caribbean box jellyfish can learn to identify and avoid obstacles in its path using only eyes and specialized cells.

Researchers on September 22 Current Biology I report this experiment, which is the first evidence that jellyfish can make mental connections between events without brain activity, such as seeing and approaching an object or changing its behavior accordingly.

John Belicki, a neuroethologist at the University of Kiel in Germany, said in this regard that learning may not require a very complex nervous system, but learning depends on nerve cells or a very limited circuit system. If so, this new finding could help explain how learning evolved in animals.