holy shit i am learning that there is a worm that is 1mm long called the caenorhabditis elegans that has so few cells in it's body that it's known and documented what EACH of the <1000 CELLS is and does??? it's brain only has 302 neurons which means apparently they're not far off from being able to record this thing's complete neural activity.
where this is going is a project called OpenWorm which looks like an attempt to digitally simulate the entire physical+neural workings of this worm??
here's the OpenWorm Wikipedia and their website
tumblr worm fandom: mean girls talking about amy dallon
cohost worm fandom: hey what if we sequenced every neuron in a worm's brain. this is normal to want and possible to achieve
Specific loops of neurons that output a rhythmic behavior are called central pattern generators and they're the shit. We have them too for stuff like breathing and walking and chewing! Vertebrates have big groups of neurons acting together instead of individual cells, but they're organized similarly.
(The game is Crescent Loom, it works in-browser.)
C. elegans development is really cool because they display a trait called eutely, which means that their cells divide in a predetermined way that causes them to finish development with a uniform number of cells across any given individual organism. It also means that once they reach maturity, they can't get bigger by generating more cells, the cells they already have simply get Bigger.
This is also convenient for a model organism since they'll all develop in the same way with all the same pieces
