23/11/2025
Amazing, urchins don’t have a brain they are a brain!! 🩷❤️🧡💛💚🩵💙💜
MAJOR DISCOVERY: Sea urchins don’t have a brain—they are a brain
Sea urchins may not have a brain, but they are one. New research has revealed that juvenile sea urchins possess a highly sophisticated nervous system that spans their entire body.
Unlike the familiar centralized brains of vertebrates or the diffuse nerve nets of simpler creatures, sea urchins boast a fully integrated “all-body brain.”
Using single-nucleus genetic profiling, scientists discovered that over half of the cell clusters in young adult sea urchins were active neurons—expressing key neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, GABA, and more.
What’s even more remarkable is how this neural system forms. During metamorphosis, sea urchins transition from bilateral larvae into radially symmetrical adults. As their body plan reorganizes, so does their nervous system—forming a distributed yet coordinated network that enables perception, behavior, and control across their entire body.
This discovery overturns long-held assumptions about how nervous systems evolve and suggests that intelligence doesn’t require a central brain. Instead, nature may have engineered multiple paths to complex neural architectures—and sea urchins just revealed one of the strangest and most elegant.
Source: "Single-nucleus profiling highlights the all-brain echinoderm nervous system." Science Advances, 2025.
