Abstract
The recently described 890-million-year-old sponge fossil illuminates the early evolutionary path to the emergence of animal sentience. A sentient animal is aware of feelings and sensations due to the activity of a nervous system. Indirect markers suggest that the foundations of sentience originated hundreds of millions of years before the Cambrian. If the first neuron was a sensory cell, the presence of epithelial “neural stem cells” in ancient Porifera may have been the ancestral state of the nerve cell that appeared in Eumetazoa. In addition, sponges have neurotransmitters, such as Glutamate and GABA, and other molecular markers, such as EflMsiA, Piezo ion channel and Notch. If the 890-million-year-old fossil is identified as a sponge, the emergence of the buiding blocks of sentience among animals began much earlier than previously thought.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
Not Applicable.
Code Availability
Not Applicable
References
Antcliffe, J. B., Callow, R. H., & Brasier, M. D. (2014). Giving the early fossil record of sponges a squeeze. Biological Reviews, 89(4), 972–1004. https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12090
Dohrmann, M., & Wörheide, G. (2017). Dating early animal evolution using phylogenomic data. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-03791-w
Duboule, D., & Wilkins, A. S. (1998). The evolution of ‘bricolage’. Trends in Genetics, 14, 54–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0168-9525(97)01358-9
Dunn, C. W., Giribet, G., Edgecombe, G. D., & Hejnol, A. (2014). Animal phylogeny and its evolutionary implications. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 45, 371–395. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-120213-091627
Elliott, G. R., & Leys, S. P. (2010). Evidence for glutamate, GABA and NO in coordinating behaviour in the sponge Ephydatia muelleri (Demospongiae, Spongillidae). Journal of Experimental Biology, 213(13), 2310–2321. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.039859
Ellwanger, K., Eich, A., & Nickel, M. (2007). GABA and glutamate specifically induce contractions in the sponge Tethya wilhelma. Journal of Comparative Physiology A, 193(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-006-0165-y
Evans, S. D., Hughes, I. V., Gehling, J. G., & Droser, M. L. (2020). Discovery of the oldest bilaterian from the Ediacaran of South Australia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117(14), 7845–7850. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2001045117
Feuda, R., Dohrmann, M., Pett, W., Philippe, H., Rota-Stabelli, O., Lartillot, N. … Pisani, D. (2017). Improved modeling of compositional heterogeneity supports sponges as sister to all other animals. Current Biology, 27, 3864–3870. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.11.008
Held, L. I. (2017). Deep homology? Uncanny similarities of humans and flies uncovered by evo-devo. Cambridge University Press
Jacob, F. (1977). Evolution and tinkering. Science, 196, 1161–1166. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.860134
Leys, S. P. (2015). Elements of a ‘nervous system’ in sponges. Journal of Experimental Biology, 218(4), 581–591. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.110817
Mah, J. L., & Leys, S. P. (2017). Think like a sponge: the genetic signal of sensory cells in sponges. Developmental Biology, 431(1), 93–100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ydbio.2017.06.012
Marino, L. (2020). Sentience in all organisms with centralized nervous systems. Animal Sentience, 29(19), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.51291/2377-7478.1596
Marlow, H., & Arendt, D. (2014). Evolution: ctenophore genomes and the origin of neurons. Current Biology, 24(16), R757–R761. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.06.057
Okamoto, K., Nakatsukasa, M., Alie, A., Masuda, Y., Agata, K., & Funayama, N. (2012). The active stem cell specific expression of sponge Musashi homolog EflMsiA suggests its involvement in maintaining the stem cell state. Mechanisms of Development, 129, 24–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mod.2012.03.001
Parry, L. A., Lerosey-Aubril, E., Weaver, J. C., & Ortega-Hernández, J. (2021). Cambrian comb jellies from Utah illuminate the early evolution of nervous and sensory systems in ctenophores. iScience,102943. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2021.102943
Paulin, M. G., & Cahill-Lane, J. (2021). Events in early nervous system evolution. Topics in Cognitive Science, 13(1), 25–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12461
Redmond, A. K., & McLysaght, A. (2021). Evidence for sponges as sister to all other animals from partitioned phylogenomics with mixture models and recoding. Nature Communications, 12(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22074-7
Rey, S., Zalc, B., & Klämbt, C. (2020). Evolution of glial wrapping: a new hypothesis. Developmental Neurobiology, 81(5), 453–463. https://doi.org/10.1002/dneu.22739
Richards, G. S., & Degnan, B. M. (2012). The expression of Delta ligands in the sponge Amphimedon queenslandica suggests an ancient role for Notch signaling in metazoan development. EvoDevo, 3(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1186/2041-9139-3-15
Sakarya, O., Armstrong, K. A., Adamska, M., Adamski, M., Wang, I. F., Tidor, B. … Kosik, K. S. (2007). A post-synaptic scaffold at the origin of the animal kingdom. PloS One, 2(6), e506. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000506
Shubin, N., Tabin, C., & Carroll, S. (1997). Fossils, genes and the evolution of animal limbs. Nature, 388(6643), 639–648. https://doi.org/10.1038/41710
Shubin, N., Tabin, C., & Carroll, S. (2009). Deep homology and the origins of evolutionary novelty. Nature, 457(7231), 818–823. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature07891
Tschopp, P., & Tabin, C. J. (2017). Deep homology in the age of next-generation sequencing. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 372, 20150475. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0475
Turner, E. C. (2021). Possible poriferan body fossils in early Neoproterozoic microbial reefs. Nature, 596, 87–91. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03773-z
Wu, J., Lewis, A. H., & Grandl, J. (2017). Touch, tension, and transduction–the function and regulation of Piezo ion channels. Trends in Biochemical Sciences, 42(1), 57–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tibs.2016.09.004
Acknowledgements
We thank CAPES for support (Finance Code 001), FAPESP for funding and fellowships (2017/16305-6, DS; 2017/11768-8, CMDS) and CNPq for fellowship (307662/2019‑5, CMDS).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
All the authors were responsible for discussing, synthesizing, and writing the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare no conflict of interests.
Ethical Approval
Not Applicable.
Consent to Participate
Not Applicable.
Consent for Publication
Not Applicable.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Andrade, M.P., Santos, D., Bueno, G.M. et al. What if… Sponges Originated 890 Million Years Ago? On the Emergence of Some Precursors of Animal Sentience. Evol Biol 48, 404–406 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11692-021-09551-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11692-021-09551-z