‘The biggest takeaway so far is that we uncovered a photoreceptor – or light-sensing cell – that provides the organism with information about the type of light and duration of moonlight in the sky,’ said Tessmar-Raible. One of her focuses is a marine bristle worm called Platynereis dumerilii, which inhabits coastal waters from temperate to tropical seas. Professor Kristin Tessmar-Raible, Mari.Time Many hormones in the worm species we study have closely related human counterparts. To delve deeper, Tessmar-Raible has been studying circalunar rhythms in ocean-dwelling animals as part of the EU-funded Mari.Time project, which runs for five years through 2024. Researchers are shedding light on the environmental factors that may knock these biological rhythms out of sync.īut much about “chronobiology” remains unknown, including the mechanisms involved at a genetic and molecular level. This complex system regulates everything from sleep and digestion to metabolism and mood. The clock’s name comes from the Latin words “circa”, meaning “around”, and “dies”, meaning “day”. ‘Understanding how the time-related interconnection of individuals within and across species works is critical for ecologically stable systems,’ said Professor Kristin Tessmar-Raible, a neurobiologist at the University of Vienna in Austria.Īnother, perhaps more familiar, form of biological clock – the circadian one – modulates the daily 24-hour sleep-wake cycle in response to environmental cues like light and temperature. The ability to stay “in sync” is key to survival. Most multicellular organisms have, or are thought to have, some kind of inbuilt biological clock and many important processes including feeding and reproducing rely on accurate timings. Such rhythms are typically governed by circalunar clocks, a form of protein-controlled biological clock attuned to the 29.5-day cycle between new moons. These eventually settle, seeding new coral colonies.Ĭorals are not the only creatures to synchronise breeding by the light of the moon. For several days after each November full moon, a wondrous spectacle occurs on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia: corals release into the water billions of eggs and sperm that unite to form free-floating larvae.
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