Topic: thermoregulatory behaviours

Living functions depend on temperature: an optimal one may increase the rate of development and reproduction, while extreme ones may stop basic biochemical reactions affecting an organism irreversibly. Therefore, sensing temperature and thermoregulatory behaviours may have been core functions of the nervous system since its origin in multicellular animals. It is possible to shed light on this hypothesis by studying cnidarians. Cnidarians (e.g., jellyfish) and bilaterians split from a common ancestor, the first carrier of neurons, about 750 million years ago. Neural thermal responses and thermo