Meeting Abstract
Despite adaptations that include centralized nervous structures, giant neurons, elaborate sensory structures, striated muscle, and species-specific specializations in neural circuitry, cnidarian nervous and muscular systems are “constrained” by architectural features such as radial or biradial symmetry and broad, two-dimensional muscle sheets. The relatively simple neuroethology of sessile scyphozoan polyps is contrasted by the elaborate behavioral repertoire and neuronal circuitry exhibited by hydrozoan and cubozoan medusae. Comparative analyses of neuronal form and function is allowing an inventory of common and specific features within and between cnidarian groups which should provide a backdrop for comparison with genomic and transcriptomic data related to the phylogenetic relationships of cnidarian groups. The hope is this will help point to a common evolutionary past of the phylum, and to the rudiments of an ancestral nervous system.
