ArticleCurrent biology : CB2017
The Jellyfish Cassiopea Exhibits a Sleep-like State.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 110 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
110 citing papers in PubMed, 261 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Sentinel Sleep Theory: Unweaving the biological function of REM sleep.Sleep medicine: X · 2026Article
- Invertebrate brains as diversified models for understanding sleep mechanisms and function.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2026Review
- A screen for stress-induced sleep genes in Caenorhabditis elegans reveals a role for glutamate signaling.Genetics · 2026Article
- Revisiting nerve nets: functional organization and evolutionary implications.The EMBO journal · 2026Review
- Neuronal microexons modulate arousal via the cAMP-PKA-CREB pathway in zebrafish.Science advances · 2026Article
- The myth of the metabolic baseline: sleep-wake cycles undermine a foundational assumption in organismal biology.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Does heat tolerance vary with rates of oxygen production in photosymbiotic cnidarians?The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Examining sleep signals at the cradle of life: can phylogenomic analysis of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) reveal the fundamental role of sleep?Molecular genetics and genomics : MGG · 2026Article
- DNA damage modulates sleep drive in basal cnidarians with divergent chronotypes.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Looking back: tracing the origins of sleep across the animal kingdom.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Review
- Contributions of Zebrafish to Our Understanding of the Function and Regulation of Sleep.Current sleep medicine reports · 2026Review
- Sleep regulation inFrontiers in neuroscience · 2026Review
- A light-entrained clock mechanism in a hydrozoan jellyfish synchronizes evening gamete release.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Can sleep be "banked"? A PRO-CON debate.Sleep · 2025Article
- The influence of sleep disruption on learning and memory in fish.Journal of sleep research · 2025Article
- Neurobiology of mitochondrial dynamics in sleep.The Journal of physiology · 2025Review
- Harnessing Simple Animal Models to Decode Sleep Mysteries.Molecular biotechnology · 2025Review
- An early surge of norepinephrine along brainstem pathways drives sensory-evoked awakening.Science advances · 2025Article
- Mitochondrial origins of the pressure to sleep.Nature · 2025Article
50 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Do all animals sleep? Sleep has been observed in many vertebrates, and there is a growing body of evidence for sleep-like states in arthropods and nematodes [1-5]. Here we show that sleep is also present in Cnidaria [6-8], an earlier-branching metazoan lineage. Cnidaria and Ctenophora are the first metazoan phyla to evolve tissue-level organization and differentiated cell types, such as neurons and muscle [9-15]. In Cnidaria, neurons are organized into a non-centralized radially symmetric nerve net [11, 13, 15-17] that nevertheless shares fundamental properties with the vertebrate nervous system: action potentials, synaptic transmission, neuropeptides, and neurotransmitters [15-20]. It was reported that cnidarian soft corals [21] and box jellyfish [22, 23] exhibit periods of quiescence, a pre-requisite for sleep-like states, prompting us to ask whether sleep is present in Cnidaria. Within Cnidaria, the upside-down jellyfish Cassiopea spp. displays a quantifiable pulsing behavior, allowing us to perform long-term behavioral tracking. Monitoring of Cassiopea pulsing activity for consecutive days and nights revealed behavioral quiescence at night that is rapidly reversible, as well as a delayed response to stimulation in the quiescent state. When deprived of nighttime quiescence, Cassiopea exhibited decreased activity and reduced responsiveness to a sensory stimulus during the subsequent day, consistent with homeostatic regulation of the quiescent state. Together, these results indicate that Cassiopea has a sleep-like state, supporting the hypothesis that sleep arose early in the metazoan lineage, prior to the emergence of a centralized nervous system.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.