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Vision Made Easy: Cubozoans Can Advance Our Understanding of Systems-Level Visual Information Processing

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Marine Organisms as Model Systems in Biology and Medicine

Part of the book series: Results and Problems in Cell Differentiation ((RESULTS,volume 65))

Abstract

Animals relying on vision as their main sensory modality reserve a large part of their central nervous system to appropriately navigate their environment. In general, neural involvement correlates to the complexity of the visual system and behavioural repertoire. In humans, one third of the available neural capacity supports our single-chambered general-purpose eyes, whereas animals with less elaborate visual systems need less computational power, and generally have smaller brains, and thereby lack in visual behaviour. As a consequence, both traditional model animals (mice, zebrafish, and flies) and more experimentally tractable animals (Hydra, Planaria, and C. elegans) cannot contribute to our understanding of systems-level visual information processing—a Goldilocks case of too big and too small.

However, one animal, the box jellyfish Tripedalia cystophora, possesses a rather complex visual system, displays multiple visual behaviours, yet processes visual information by means of a relatively simple central nervous system. This—just right—model system could not only provide information on how visual stimuli are processed through distinct combinations of neural circuitry but also provide a processing algorithm for extracting specific information from a complex visual scene.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are indebted to Dan-Eric Nilsson for helping with the figures and continuous scientific insights.

This project was funded by the Cluster of Excellence ‘The Future Ocean’. ‘The Future Ocean’ is funded within the framework of the Excellence Initiative by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) on behalf of the German federal and state governments. JB acknowledges Danish Independent Research Grant no. DFF—1325-00146. AG acknowledges DFF—4181-00398.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. GEOMAR – Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, Kiel, Germany

    Jan Bielecki

  2. Institute of Physiology, Christian Albrechts University, Kiel, Germany

    Jan Bielecki

  3. Marine Biological Section, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Anders Garm

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  1. Jan Bielecki
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  2. Anders Garm
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Correspondence to Jan Bielecki .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Houston Methodist Research Institute, Houston, Texas, USA

    Malgorzata Kloc

  2. Institute of Genetics and Development of Rennes, Université de Rennes, Rennes, France

    Jacek Z. Kubiak

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Bielecki, J., Garm, A. (2018). Vision Made Easy: Cubozoans Can Advance Our Understanding of Systems-Level Visual Information Processing. In: Kloc, M., Kubiak, J. (eds) Marine Organisms as Model Systems in Biology and Medicine. Results and Problems in Cell Differentiation, vol 65. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92486-1_27

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