Are there any invertebrates that can and cannot be paralyzed?
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I might be talking out my ass here, but paralyzation is from the spinal cord getting damaged. If the comparable wiring connecting the invertebrate’s brain to its feet gets damaged, I don’t see why that wouldn’t cause paralysis.
Their nervous systems aren’t always so highly centralized so whether you can do catastrophic damage in one spot or not will vary.
In a segmented insect like a bee or ant they do have a spine-esque nerve bundle moving from the head to the thorax and presumably it could suffer the same damage.
A starfish has a decentralized ring-shaped nervous system and you can literally chop them in half with a cleaver to make two independent starfish halves that might grow back into new starfish.
This is the case for a lot of radially symmetric invertebrates like urchins and jellyfish, there is no “brain” located in a “head” controlling everything remotely, and so you can’t sever it.
If you consider paralysis to mean “can’t move if they want to” then yes. You can paralyse invertebrates. They still use similar nerve cells as vertebrates, and just like you can inject a vertebrate with a certain drug that blocks the signals to the muscles, you can block those signals in invertebrates. The signal is now unable to travel down to the part of the body that is supposed to move and they are in essence paralysed.
If you consider paralysis to be more like when people have paraplegia and can’t move their legs, that’s usually due to a problem in the spine. Invertebrates, by definition, lack a spine so they can’t really be paraplegic. They also usually don’t have 4 limbs like we do so the definitions don’t really apply.
As long as an animal has a place where a signal comes from, and a place where it goes to to make the animal move, you can block that signal and keep it from moving.
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