Is sleep’s ‘supreme mystery’ unraveling? An evolutionary analysis of sleep encounters no mystery; nor does life’s earliest sleep, recently discovered in jellyfish

Summary 

Biotelemetry has revealed daily 15-h behavioral sleep periods in a cubomedusan jellyfish, Chironex fleckeri. Its sleep is expected to be phylogenetically most primitive, since jellyfish possess only two germ layers. They belong to the phylum Cnidaria, the ‘simplest’ multicellular organisms with an organized nervous system. Cubomedusae have a complex visual system with 24 eyes of four different types, each type specialized for a different task. Input to these eyes during visually guided fast-swimming predation requires enormous amounts of neural processing, possibly nearly saturating the capacity of their comparatively simple nervous system. These heavy neural demands may account for the need for fifteen hours of sleep. C. fleckeri is the only animal known for which sleep may be either present or absent, dependent on lifestyle. Limited knowledge of behavior of some other cubomedusae suggests that they also possess this faculty. The finding of sleep in C. fleckeri supports current proposals of sleep’s origin and basic function. Evolutionary analyses link sleep to a conflict produced by excessive processing demands on multifunctional neural circuitry for detailed focal vision by complex lensed eyes. The conflict arises between the enormous demands of complex visual analysis and needs for split-second control of actions, on the one hand, and non-urgent processing of memories of ongoing and stored events, on the other. Conflict is resolved by deferring the non-urgent processing to periods of sleep. Without sleep, selection would favor the evolution of circuitry ‘dedicated’ to single or but few tasks, with corresponding lesser efficiency. Had complex lensed eyes of medusae originated as a consequence of selection for increased mating success of males pursuing females, it could have occurred before the evolution of fast-swimming bilateral (three-germ-layered) prey. But if it was a consequence of selection for increased prey-hunting success, the origin of such eyes probably awaited the coexistence of bilateral prey.