Nettlesome
- marketingc8
- 9 minutes ago
- 2 min read
This time, we start with vocabulary.
Cnidarian.
It’s a Greek word built on the simpler word meaning knídē or “nettle.” And a “nettle,” as a noun, is a stinging plant.
For animals, being cnidarian means you share something in common with those plants. You sting. You’re a jellyfish, a coral, a Portuguese man o’ war, an anemone.
(Don’t you love saying the word anemone, the way it rolls off the tongue? Get ready to pronounce it many times in the paragraphs ahead.)
Cnidarians possess specialized stinging cells called cnidocytes that can inject venom. This is a defining characteristic.
The other defining characteristic is that they have radial symmetry. Their body parts are arranged around a central axis. Cnidarians are one major division in the kingdom Animalia. The other is bilaterians—those animals with bilateral symmetry.
Us humans? We’re bilaterians.
Understanding this division goes back as far as Rudolf Lueckart, by the way, a German zoologist who worked in the late 19th Century and was also a pioneer in the field of parasitology. (He wrote two whole books on human parasites!)
So why bring all this up?
Because a new study has found that the sea anemone uses bilaterian-like techniques to form its body.
And this suggests that these techniques evolved before these two phyla separated. In general, there is precious little that appears, on the surface, to connect us with them. Anemones don’t even have brains, for starters.
But scientists have discovered that an “ancient blueprint” for bilaterians in their structure. The results were published in the journal Science Advances. The study was conducted by a team at the University of Vienna. They found that anemones use a technique known as “bone morphogenetic protein” (BMP) shuttling as they grow.
This is our “ancestral patterning mechanism,” in the words of the University of Vienna’s David Mörsdorf, one of the lead authors of the study. The finding, he added, gives us humans a trace of history going back 600 to 700 million years ago.
The BMP “shuttling” business is key.
“The fact that not only bilaterians but also sea anemones use shuttling to shape their body axes, tells us that this mechanism is incredibly ancient," says Mörsdorf, in a university news release that explains the research methodology in good detail. "It opens up exciting possibilities for rethinking how body plans evolved in early animals."
Bottom line? We go back—way, way back. It might be a “trace,” but it’s there. Our roots!
And on days when you might be feeling a bit nettlesome, well, now you know why.
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