A complex network of fungi in the lower canopy could be one reason tropical rainforests are home to so many different types of insects, spiders and centipedes, say scientists.
They found that nearly half of these creatures – called arthropods – are largely dependent on an almost-invisible network of fungi that traps dead leaves that have fallen from the upper canopy.
When the researchers removed the fungi, both the numbers and diversity of arthropods dropped dramatically.
The findings could help conservationists figure out how to retain some level of arthropod diversity in managed landscapes like oil palm plantations, or logged forest.
The fungi branch through the lower canopy extending from the forest floor up to around 30 metres high, catching falling leaves wherever their strands go.
'These fungi are everywhere, and form a messy tangle in the forest understory. You can't really see it until you look for it. You're always looking past it, moving it out of the way as you walk through the forest,' explains Dr Jake Snaddon from the University of Oxford, lead author of the study.
This could be why, up until now, its importance was almost entirely overlooked.
Read more here ...
Showing posts with label arthropods. Show all posts
Showing posts with label arthropods. Show all posts
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Friday, February 25, 2011
Walking cactus discovered in China
By Wynne Parry, LiveScience / February 25, 2011
Fossils of a 10-legged wormy creature that lived 520 million years ago may fill an important gap in the history of the evolution of insects, spiders and crustaceans.
The so-called walking cactus belongs to a group of extinct worm-like creatures called lobopodians that are thought to have given rise to arthropods. Spiders and other arthropods have segmented bodies and jointed limbs covered in a hardened shell.
Before the discovery of the walking cactus, Diania cactiformis, all lobopodian remains had soft bodies and soft limbs, said Jianni Liu, the lead researcher who is affiliated with Northwest University in China and Freie University in Germany.
"Walking cactus is very important because it is sort of a missing link from lobopodians to arthropods," Liu told LiveScience. "Scientists have always suspected that arthropods evolved from somewhere amongst lobopodians, but until now we didn't have a single fossil you could point at and say that is the first one with jointed legs. And this is what walking cactus shows." [Image of walking cactus fossil]
Leggy find
Liu and other researchers described the extinct creature based on three complete fossils and 30 partial ones discovered in Yunnan Province in southern China. The walking cactus had a body divided into nine segments with 10 pairs of hardened, jointed legs, and it measured about 2.4 inches (6 centimeters) long.
It's not clear how the leggy worm made its living. It could have used its tube-like mouth called a proboscis to suck tiny things from the mud, or it may have used its spiny front legs to grab prey, Liu said.
Clues to arthropod evolution are preserved in modern-day velvet worms, which are considered the only living relative to all arthropods. Once mistaken for slugs, these land-dwelling worms are almost entirely soft-bodied except for hardened claws and jaws.
Where spiders, insects and others came from
The discovery of the walking cactus helps fill in the evolutionary history between the velvet worms and modern arthropods, which, in terms of numbers and diversity, are the most dominant group of animals on the planet, according to Graham Budd, a professor of paleobiology at Uppsala University in Sweden, who was not involved in the current study.
The walking cactus is the first and only case of hardened, jointed limbs built for walking appearing in a creature that is not recognizable as an arthropod, Budd said.
But Budd is not convinced that, as the researchers argue, the walking cactus's hardened legs were passed directly down to modern arthropods.
"I am not persuaded that it is a direct ancestor or as closely related to living arthropods as they suggest," he told LiveScience. "I would like to see more evidence; the great thing is a lot more material keeps coming up."
For instance, it is possible that the walking cactus is less closely related to modern arthropods, and that hardened legs evolved multiple times. It is also possible that the bodies of primitive arthropods hardened before their legs did, Budd said.
New fossils, particularly from China, have helped clarify the evolutionary history of arthropods, and in the last decade or so, scientists have come to more consensus regarding that history, he added.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/0225/Walking-cactus-discovered-in-China
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Where Did Insects Come From? New Study Establishes Relationships Among All Arthropods
RIGHT: This animal, Speleonectes tulumensis, is from a group of rare, blind, cave-dwelling crustaceans called "remipedes." The new analysis in Nature shows that the remipedes are the crustaceans most closely related to the insects. Remipedes and insects together are now shown to be a sister group to all the other crustacea including the crabs, shrimps, and lobsters. (Credit: Simon Richards)
ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2010) — Since the dawn of the biological sciences, humankind has struggled to comprehend the relationships among the major groups of "jointed-legged" animals -- the arthropods. Now, a team of researchers, including Dr. Joel Martin and Dr. Regina Wetzer from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM), has finished a completely new analysis of the evolutionary relationships among the arthropods, answering many questions that defied previous attempts to unravel how these creatures were connected.
Their study is scheduled for publication in the journal Nature on Feb. 24.
Now, for the first time, science has a solid grasp of what those relationships are, and a framework upon which to build. The new study makes a major contribution to our understanding of the nature and origins of the planet's biodiversity. The paper's other researchers are Jerome C. Regier, Andreas Zwick and April Hussey from the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute; Jeffrey W. Shultz of the University of Maryland's Department of Entomology; and Bernard Ball and Clifford W. Cunningham from Duke University's Department of Biology.
There are millions of distinct species of arthropods, including all the insects, crustaceans, millipedes, centipedes, spiders, and a host of other animals, all united by having a hard external shell and jointed legs. They are by far the most numerous, and most diverse, of all creatures on Earth -- in terms of the sheer number of species, no other group comes close. They make up perhaps 1.6 million of the estimated 1.8 to 1.9 million described species, dominating the planet in number, biomass, and diversity.
The economic aspects of arthropods are also overwhelming. From seafood industries worth billions of dollars annually to the world's economy, to the importance of insects as pollinators of ornamental and agriculturally important crops, to the medical role played by arthropods (e.g. as disease vectors and parasites), to biological control of introduced species, to their role in every known food web, to toxicology and biopharmaceuticals, arthropods are by far the planet's most important group of animals.
"We've never really known how arthropods, the most successful animals on Earth, evolved into the diversity we see today," said research scientist and co-author Dr. Regina Wetzer. "For me, what makes this study really exciting is getting such a solid understanding of how these animals are related, so that now we can better understand how they evolved."
Because of their amazing diversity, deciphering the evolutionary history and relationships among the major subgroups of arthropods has proven difficult. Scientists have tried using various combinations of features, in recent years including DNA sequences, to try to understand which groups are related through common ancestors. To date, those attempts have been stymied by the sheer number of species and wild shape variations between the various groups.
One of the most important results of this new study is support for the hypothesis that the insects evolved from a group of crustaceans. So flies, honeybees, ants, and crickets all branched off the arthropod family tree from within the lineage that gave rise to today's crabs, shrimp, and lobsters. Another important finding is that the "Chelicerata" (a group that includes the spiders, scorpions, ticks, and mites) branched off very early, earlier than the millipedes, centipedes, crustaceans, and insects. That means that the spiders, for example, are more distantly related to the insects than many researchers previously thought.
This team approached the problem of illuminating the arthropod family tree by using genetic data (DNA sequences) obtained from 75 species carefully selected to sample the range of arthropod diversity. Many previous analyses were based on the sequences of a handful of genes. The researchers in this study, knowing the daunting diversity they faced, used DNA sequence information from as many genes as they could. In the end, they were able to apply data from 62 protein-coding genes to the problem, leading to an extremely well-supported analysis.
"The Museum's collection of arthropods, and in particular its collection of crustaceans, are what made a study like this possible in the first place," says Dr. Joel W. Martin, NHM Curator of Crustacea and one of the authors who designed the study nearly eight years ago. "The wealth of stored biodiversity information contained in it, both in terms of specimens and in terms of the data, theories, and research related to those specimens, are why natural history museums exist, and why they play such a critical role in explaining the world's diversity. Studies like this confirm the incredible value, not only of existing natural history museum collections, but of continuing to add to these collections every year."
A key problem that the research team had to solve was obtaining specimens of some of rare and obscure organisms whose DNA was needed for the analysis. Because of their extensive experience in field biology, this was a major contribution to the project from NHM scientists. Dr. Wetzer recalls lying on the beach with a microscope at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She was hunting for specimens of a tiny, little-known crustacean that lives between grains of sand. "I got the mystacocarids we needed, but I think I also provided pretty good entertainment to the families at the beach that day," Dr. Wetzer said.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100216114034.htm
Their study is scheduled for publication in the journal Nature on Feb. 24.
Now, for the first time, science has a solid grasp of what those relationships are, and a framework upon which to build. The new study makes a major contribution to our understanding of the nature and origins of the planet's biodiversity. The paper's other researchers are Jerome C. Regier, Andreas Zwick and April Hussey from the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute; Jeffrey W. Shultz of the University of Maryland's Department of Entomology; and Bernard Ball and Clifford W. Cunningham from Duke University's Department of Biology.
There are millions of distinct species of arthropods, including all the insects, crustaceans, millipedes, centipedes, spiders, and a host of other animals, all united by having a hard external shell and jointed legs. They are by far the most numerous, and most diverse, of all creatures on Earth -- in terms of the sheer number of species, no other group comes close. They make up perhaps 1.6 million of the estimated 1.8 to 1.9 million described species, dominating the planet in number, biomass, and diversity.
The economic aspects of arthropods are also overwhelming. From seafood industries worth billions of dollars annually to the world's economy, to the importance of insects as pollinators of ornamental and agriculturally important crops, to the medical role played by arthropods (e.g. as disease vectors and parasites), to biological control of introduced species, to their role in every known food web, to toxicology and biopharmaceuticals, arthropods are by far the planet's most important group of animals.
"We've never really known how arthropods, the most successful animals on Earth, evolved into the diversity we see today," said research scientist and co-author Dr. Regina Wetzer. "For me, what makes this study really exciting is getting such a solid understanding of how these animals are related, so that now we can better understand how they evolved."
Because of their amazing diversity, deciphering the evolutionary history and relationships among the major subgroups of arthropods has proven difficult. Scientists have tried using various combinations of features, in recent years including DNA sequences, to try to understand which groups are related through common ancestors. To date, those attempts have been stymied by the sheer number of species and wild shape variations between the various groups.
One of the most important results of this new study is support for the hypothesis that the insects evolved from a group of crustaceans. So flies, honeybees, ants, and crickets all branched off the arthropod family tree from within the lineage that gave rise to today's crabs, shrimp, and lobsters. Another important finding is that the "Chelicerata" (a group that includes the spiders, scorpions, ticks, and mites) branched off very early, earlier than the millipedes, centipedes, crustaceans, and insects. That means that the spiders, for example, are more distantly related to the insects than many researchers previously thought.
This team approached the problem of illuminating the arthropod family tree by using genetic data (DNA sequences) obtained from 75 species carefully selected to sample the range of arthropod diversity. Many previous analyses were based on the sequences of a handful of genes. The researchers in this study, knowing the daunting diversity they faced, used DNA sequence information from as many genes as they could. In the end, they were able to apply data from 62 protein-coding genes to the problem, leading to an extremely well-supported analysis.
"The Museum's collection of arthropods, and in particular its collection of crustaceans, are what made a study like this possible in the first place," says Dr. Joel W. Martin, NHM Curator of Crustacea and one of the authors who designed the study nearly eight years ago. "The wealth of stored biodiversity information contained in it, both in terms of specimens and in terms of the data, theories, and research related to those specimens, are why natural history museums exist, and why they play such a critical role in explaining the world's diversity. Studies like this confirm the incredible value, not only of existing natural history museum collections, but of continuing to add to these collections every year."
A key problem that the research team had to solve was obtaining specimens of some of rare and obscure organisms whose DNA was needed for the analysis. Because of their extensive experience in field biology, this was a major contribution to the project from NHM scientists. Dr. Wetzer recalls lying on the beach with a microscope at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She was hunting for specimens of a tiny, little-known crustacean that lives between grains of sand. "I got the mystacocarids we needed, but I think I also provided pretty good entertainment to the families at the beach that day," Dr. Wetzer said.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100216114034.htm
(Submitted by Ray D)
Friday, March 20, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Decline of Shorebird Linked to Bait Use of Horseshoe Crabs
Released: 2/12/2009 4:38:47 PM
Declining numbers of a shorebird called the red knot have been linked to bait use of horseshoe crabs.
Long-term surveys of red knots showed that the average weight of red knots when they leave Delaware Bay has declined significantly since their primary food source, eggs of horseshoe crabs, has been reduced. The study also revealed that red knot survivorship is related to departure weight, and that the population size of red knots has declined by more than 75 percent.
"We concluded that the increased harvest of horseshoe crabs led to a reduction in the food supply for red knots at a critical period in their annual cycle, and this led to a dramatic decline in population size," said USGS scientist, Jon Bart, one of the authors of the study.
There is a long tradition in Delaware Bay of harvesting horseshoe crabs for use as bait in various fisheries. In the years from 1992 to 1997, reported harvest of crabs grew 20 fold from about 100,000 individuals harvested to more than 2 million. This newly released study shows that this increase in horseshoe crab harvest has led to a dramatic decrease in the number of spawning crabs and to a 90 percent decline in crab eggs available for shorebirds to eat.
Delaware Bay is globally recognized as an important feeding stopover for migrating shorebirds, especially red knots. Each year, red knots migrate from Arctic breeding grounds to the southern tip of South America and back, covering more than 18,600 miles. In May, large numbers of red knots congregate in the bay during their northward migration where they gorge on horseshoe crab eggs in preparation for their continued migration to the Arctic.
Concern over red knot populations led to restrictions in horseshoe crab harvest starting in 1997. But as Lawrence Niles, a biologist with the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey and senior author of the new study says, "Despite restrictions, the 2007 horseshoe crab harvest was still well above that of 1990, and no recovery of knots was detectable. Recovery of both horseshoe crabs and red knots may require more restrictions on horseshoe crab harvest, possibly even a complete moratorium for some period. We've proposed a program of adaptive management, including monitoring, that should result in the information managers need to find the right balance."
Fifteen scientists participated in the study, from a wide variety of federal, state, and nongovernmental entities. The results are published in the February edition of the science journal Bioscience. The title of the article is, "Effects of horseshoe crab harvest in Delaware Bay on red knots: Are harvest restrictions working?"
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2137&from=rss_home
Declining numbers of a shorebird called the red knot have been linked to bait use of horseshoe crabs.
Long-term surveys of red knots showed that the average weight of red knots when they leave Delaware Bay has declined significantly since their primary food source, eggs of horseshoe crabs, has been reduced. The study also revealed that red knot survivorship is related to departure weight, and that the population size of red knots has declined by more than 75 percent.
"We concluded that the increased harvest of horseshoe crabs led to a reduction in the food supply for red knots at a critical period in their annual cycle, and this led to a dramatic decline in population size," said USGS scientist, Jon Bart, one of the authors of the study.
There is a long tradition in Delaware Bay of harvesting horseshoe crabs for use as bait in various fisheries. In the years from 1992 to 1997, reported harvest of crabs grew 20 fold from about 100,000 individuals harvested to more than 2 million. This newly released study shows that this increase in horseshoe crab harvest has led to a dramatic decrease in the number of spawning crabs and to a 90 percent decline in crab eggs available for shorebirds to eat.
Delaware Bay is globally recognized as an important feeding stopover for migrating shorebirds, especially red knots. Each year, red knots migrate from Arctic breeding grounds to the southern tip of South America and back, covering more than 18,600 miles. In May, large numbers of red knots congregate in the bay during their northward migration where they gorge on horseshoe crab eggs in preparation for their continued migration to the Arctic.
Concern over red knot populations led to restrictions in horseshoe crab harvest starting in 1997. But as Lawrence Niles, a biologist with the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey and senior author of the new study says, "Despite restrictions, the 2007 horseshoe crab harvest was still well above that of 1990, and no recovery of knots was detectable. Recovery of both horseshoe crabs and red knots may require more restrictions on horseshoe crab harvest, possibly even a complete moratorium for some period. We've proposed a program of adaptive management, including monitoring, that should result in the information managers need to find the right balance."
Fifteen scientists participated in the study, from a wide variety of federal, state, and nongovernmental entities. The results are published in the February edition of the science journal Bioscience. The title of the article is, "Effects of horseshoe crab harvest in Delaware Bay on red knots: Are harvest restrictions working?"
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2137&from=rss_home
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