Imagine a world where there were no arthropods.
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Imagine a world where there were no arthropods. There are plants and fungi, and these would still make it on to land. In the sea you have bivalves and mollusks, and vertebrates.
Naturally the mollusks still make it on to land no problem. And perhaps we see The Age of the Snail.
However, would vertebrates ever bother with just the buffet of plans, fungi and snails to entice them? No insects, no spiders, no crabs in the sand.
Maybe, without the arthropods the snails take over I think.
@futurebird your statement that without arthropods snails woild take over is true. The lab Im interning for is doing an experiment looking at how insecticides can actually increase crop damage if they kill ground beetles, letting the slugs run rampant. Arthropods are the only thing stopping mollusks from taking over the world
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F myrmepropagandist shared this topic
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Imagine a world where there were no arthropods. There are plants and fungi, and these would still make it on to land. In the sea you have bivalves and mollusks, and vertebrates.
Naturally the mollusks still make it on to land no problem. And perhaps we see The Age of the Snail.
However, would vertebrates ever bother with just the buffet of plans, fungi and snails to entice them? No insects, no spiders, no crabs in the sand.
Maybe, without the arthropods the snails take over I think.
@futurebird Without arthropods, would lobopods and Onychophora take over?
Imagine a wonderful world dominated by velvet worms. Where they diversify to fill in niches that arthropods don't occupy. Velvet worm crabs, Velvet worm ants and Velvet worm butterflies.
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@futurebird Without arthropods, would lobopods and Onychophora take over?
Imagine a wonderful world dominated by velvet worms. Where they diversify to fill in niches that arthropods don't occupy. Velvet worm crabs, Velvet worm ants and Velvet worm butterflies.
This is only tangentially related but I think you will enjoy if you didn't see it yet:
myrmepropagandist (@futurebird@sauropods.win)
Attached: 1 image @VVitchy@pagan.plus I may have gotten a little too excited about the concept of "Dune, but with ants and velvet worms."
Sauropods.win (sauropods.win)
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@futurebird Without arthropods, would lobopods and Onychophora take over?
Imagine a wonderful world dominated by velvet worms. Where they diversify to fill in niches that arthropods don't occupy. Velvet worm crabs, Velvet worm ants and Velvet worm butterflies.
I, for one, welcome our new Onychophoran overlords!
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Imagine a world where there were no arthropods. There are plants and fungi, and these would still make it on to land. In the sea you have bivalves and mollusks, and vertebrates.
Naturally the mollusks still make it on to land no problem. And perhaps we see The Age of the Snail.
However, would vertebrates ever bother with just the buffet of plans, fungi and snails to entice them? No insects, no spiders, no crabs in the sand.
Maybe, without the arthropods the snails take over I think.
@futurebird maybe the selection pressures that resulted in arthropods way back when would instead produce - other kind of arthropods?!
It's too long since I studied evolution. But you've got me thinking now!
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Imagine a world where there were no arthropods. There are plants and fungi, and these would still make it on to land. In the sea you have bivalves and mollusks, and vertebrates.
Naturally the mollusks still make it on to land no problem. And perhaps we see The Age of the Snail.
However, would vertebrates ever bother with just the buffet of plans, fungi and snails to entice them? No insects, no spiders, no crabs in the sand.
Maybe, without the arthropods the snails take over I think.
@futurebird there are plenty of vertebrates that eat snails. And most fossil lungfish have the teeth for eating some kind of hard-shelled muck-dwelling prey. South American lungfish eat snails, among many other things. Maybe some of the others do as well, I don't know. Lungfish are the nearest living relatives to land vertebrates that aren't ancestrally land living. So in the absence of arthropods, snails could have been a food that provided an advantage to early tetrapods that came onto land.
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@futurebird Maybe land octopuses? I wonder why that hasn't happened in our world.
I find it puzzling there are no land-dwelling cephalopods. Several species of octopus make occasional late night trips onto land. And terrestrial gastropods (snails and slugs) have evolved many times independently. It didn't just happen once. (I don't know if any of the terrestrial slugs were shell-less when they evolved terrestrial habits. As far as I know, a lineage of gastropods can evolve a shell or evolve it away relatively easily.)
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@futurebird Without arthropods, would lobopods and Onychophora take over?
Imagine a wonderful world dominated by velvet worms. Where they diversify to fill in niches that arthropods don't occupy. Velvet worm crabs, Velvet worm ants and Velvet worm butterflies.
great idea for a spec evo universe, but I have found snails living in small streams that were otherwise surrounded by desert, and I don't think that's terribly unusual. Velvet worms, on the other hand, I've never seen outside of pictures, but from what little I know , they don't seem to be able to spread like snails do. But, without arthropods, maybe they would have evolved the ability. (And maybe they evolved it in the past, but we just don't know due to poor preservation)
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great idea for a spec evo universe, but I have found snails living in small streams that were otherwise surrounded by desert, and I don't think that's terribly unusual. Velvet worms, on the other hand, I've never seen outside of pictures, but from what little I know , they don't seem to be able to spread like snails do. But, without arthropods, maybe they would have evolved the ability. (And maybe they evolved it in the past, but we just don't know due to poor preservation)
@llewelly @futurebird Fossil Onychophora were marine, so there is the possibility of multiple land invasions if given enough time.
But one of the questions is if Velvet worms are a flexible enough body plan to supply the variation to adapt to various niches. They've been a around since the Cambrian, but they extant species still pretty much look the same and occupy very narrow niches.
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@futurebird maybe the selection pressures that resulted in arthropods way back when would instead produce - other kind of arthropods?!
It's too long since I studied evolution. But you've got me thinking now!
@futurebird ... Which reminded me: I caught the end of this documentary recently, and meant to watch it all.
You're most likely familiar with its contents, but it might be of interest!
I saw it on BBC, but I *think* it's the same as available online.
Mysterious Origins of Insects: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001zhxz via @bbciplayer
