Nervous systems are remarkable for supporting stable animal behavior despite dramatic changes to neurons' number and connectivity. An ideal model organism to study this phenomenon would have: 1) dynamic neural architecture 2) transgenic reporters of neural activity, 3) a small, transparent body, and 4) well-defined sensory-motor behaviors. While Hydra vulgaris possesses the first three advantages, it currently lacks well-characterized sensory-motor responses. Here, we show the first quantitative measurements of Hydra's behavioral responses to thermal stimulation and associated neural activity.Specifically, we find that Hydra elongate and then contract when heated. This behavior is accompanied by synchronous, periodic activity of neurons in the animal's peduncle. We find that the frequency of these neural oscillations is nearly the same even if the number of neurons change by a factor of two.These observations suggest that Hydra provides a rich model for studying how animals maintain stable sensory-motor responses within dynamic neural circuit architectures.One sentence summary: Here we show that Hydra have a group of thermally responsive neurons that encodes the absolute temperature of a thermal stimulus and that this encoding is independent of the number of neurons in the animal.
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