About
Jayson is a small beadlet sea anemone (Actinia equina), a common species of the intertidal zone in Europe.
I am Gaëlle, and I am a molecular biologist (understand a “lab” biologist and not a “field” biologist). During my PhD, I studied… you guessed it, sea anemones!
🇨🇭😷 The story of Jayson starts in 2020 in a biology lab in Fribourg, Switzerland. For what I recall, he is probably the baby of animals collected during a field trip in France earlier that year.
👩🔬🩵 After the pandemic, I was in a desperate need of a pet, and I started specifically feeding him and taking care of him. Soon enough, Jayson was considered a new member of the lab!
April 2021
🫶 🌐 As I kept doing so, to the general amusement of my coworkers and friends, one suggested that we create an Instagram account for him: Jayson&Co was born!
💬 ⏯️ We created the account in January 2021 and we posted some fun and educational content, like this video!
Since then, the family has grown and Jayson has been joined by Ginger, and 2 green cousins (Actinia prasina) : Papageno and Papagena.
After a very long break, a move from Switzerland to France, Jayson is back in 2024 with some new content!
The Jayson Family
🌊🔎 Since an eye-opening master course in the Roscoff marine station, I am fascinated by the diversity of marine invertebrates, and I firmly believe that fundamental research of weird critters is a key to great discoveries (I hope to show some great exemples here soon!).
🧠🧬 For my PhD, I moved to the Sprecher Lab in Fribourg. The worm species that I initially wanted to study was not suitable for extensive lab studies, so I ended up working on sea anemones. As we were interested in the evolution of the nervous system, we used the emerging sea anemone model species Nematostella vectensis. Indeed, like all cnidarian animals (jellyfish, corals…), sea anemones have a diffuse nervous system, i.e. a network of neurons, but no brain!
Nematostella vectensis, the starlet sea anemone
My Nematostella photo made the cover of PNAS in March 2023!
🐶🛎️ The main achievement of my PhD work was to show that sea anemones can do associative learning (the full article). Just like the dog starting to salivate in anticipation to receive food at the ring of a bell in the famous Pavlov’s experiment, they can learn to associate 2 distinct stimuli. And all of that without a brain!
🪼🎙️ The cool thing about this, is that another team of researchers found the same ability in a distantly related jellyfish species, published a few month after our study, suggesting that this ability might be widespread in all cnidarian species… I was even invited to talk about this topic for a short daily science program on french radio (the 5min podcast).
🎓🤪 So basically, I devoted 4 years of my life to show that sea anemones might not be as dull as they seem… and Jayson couldn’t agree more!
🏖️🔬 Now, I enjoy collecting animals on the shore in Saint-Malo in my free time. I do my observations directly on my living room table, and I love discovering and sharing fun facts along the way!
