Week of 11/5 to 11/9: Forest bugs, crustaceans, and birds

11/5/2018

Week of 11/5 to 11/9: Forest bugs, crustaceans, and birds

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ctenophora: Comb jellie, not quite a jellyfish: Ctenophora comprise a phylum of invertebrate animals that live in marine waters worldwide. They are notable for the groups of cilia they use for swimming, and they are the largest animals to swim with the help of cilia.

what is coral?

Coral Biology. Although many corals resemble plants, they are actually members of the animal phylum Cnidaria. Most corals are colonial, which means that each coral is made up of many individual polyps connected by living tissue (the coenosarc).

Cnidaria: Cnidaria is a phylum containing over 10,000 species of animals found exclusively in aquatic environments: they are a predominantly marine species

The first coral reefs date from the early Ordovician of about 500 million years ago, and their form at the time differed significantly from that of corals today, which, following, the mass extinction 240 million years ago at the end of the Permian period, first appeared in the middle of the Triassic period.

Brachiopods: are marine animals belonging to their own phylum, Brachiopoda, of the animal kingdom. Modern brachiopods occupy a variety of sea-bed habitats ranging from the Tropics to the cold waters of the Arctic and, especially, Antarctic.

have a very long history of life on Earth (at least 550 million years). They first appear as fossils in rocks of earliest Cambrian age

cambrian explosion

notes from the videos

Cambrian Extinction was about 488 million years ago

Ostracoderms: armoured, jawless, fishlike vertebrates that emerged during the early part of the Paleozoic Era (542–251 million years ago)

Added note:

Tiktaalik roseae is remarkably well preserved for a 375-million-year old fossil. Tiktaalik roseae, better known as the "fishapod," is a 375 million year old fossil fish which was discovered in the Canadian Arctic in 2004.

late Cambrian, eel-like jawless fish called the conodonts, and small mostly armoured fish known as ostracoderms, first appeared

Plants got bigger and absorbed more Carbon Dioxide, and there was an Ice Age

Devonian period 419 million years ago (mya), there were Devonian Forests 360 mya

Permian period 298 million years ago

Permian-Tirassic Extiction: 252 million years ago

Trilobites: some still survived, they survived about 4 mass extinctions:

Exclusively marine animals
First appeared at the beginning of the Cambrian Period, about 542 million years ago, when they dominated the seas.
Became less abundant in succeeding geologic periods, a few forms persisted into the Permian Period, which ended about 251 million years ago.

Trilobites used chitin as a protein, just like mushrooms, the shell was chitin and calcite

coral fossils tell us about climate change

geologic timescale

http://www.geomore.com/wp-content/uploads/GEOLOGIC-TIME-SCALE-COURTESY-GSA.jpg

geologic time period concept map

the oldest forests in the world

Tongass National Forest, Alaska. ...
Daintree Rainforest, Australia. ...
Waipoua Forest, New Zealand. ...
Ancient Bristecone Pine Forest, California, U.S. ...
Yakushima Forest, Japan. ...
Tarkine Forest, Tasmania, Australia. ...
Bialowieza Forest, Belarus and Poland. ...
Kakamega Forest, Kenya, Africa.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/amazing-old-growth-forests-world-180956083/

Tarkine Forest, Tasmania, Australia:

Temperate rainforest: a forest found between the tropics and polar regions in the area of the earth with the widest seasonal changes, the temperate zone.
Summers are mild, and average about 70°F (21°C), while winter temperatures are often well below freezing.
Part of Gondwanaland
Fossils between 1000-700 million years old, algal stromatolite fossils, were found around the Arthur and Julius Rivers and are Tasmania's oldest known fossils.

Here you find some of the oldest animals: Marsupials

The Tasmanian devil is a carnivorous marsupial of the family Dasyuridae.
Male: 18 lbs (Adult), Female: 13 lbs (Adult)

tasmanian devil is struggling with an illness

devil facial tumour disease (DFTD)

This most likely has to do with lack of genetic diversity

Genetic Drift: variation in the relative frequency of different genotypes in a small population, owing to the chance disappearance of particular genes as individuals die or do not reproduce.

Population Bottleneck: A population bottleneck or genetic bottleneck is a sharp reduction in the size of a population due to environmental events or human activities.

related to the quoll

marsupial phylogenetic tree

Some marsupials stayed in South America, remember Gondwanaland? They were connected to Australia

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1000436

https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2164-13-172

monotremes are older than marsupials

Lay eggs
There are only five living monotreme species: the duck-billed platypus and four species of echidna (also known as spiny anteaters).
All of them are found only in Australia and New Guinea.

genetic diversity

Gene flow: the movement of alleles from one population to another, which may increase the genetic diversity of a population.

Speciation: the genetic divergence of populations, a barrier to gene flow, leading overtime to reproductive isolation and the formation of a new species

Reproductive Isolation: mechanisms that prevent mating and gene flo between members of a different species

Founder Effect: the reduced genetic diversity that results when a population is descended from a small number of colonizing ancestors.

charles darwin in the galapagos islands

Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium: the principle that in a non-evolving population, both allele and genotype frequencies remain constant from one generation to the next

Inbreeding: mating between closely related individuals, it does not increase the allele frequency within the population but it does increase the proportion of homozygous individuals to heterozygotes

forest creatures

forest arthropods

Insects that you will find everywhere, in different forms

Orthoptera: straight leathery wing, grasshoppers, katydid, cockroach

Lepidoptera: Butterflies and moths, important pollinators

Coleoptera: Beetles, means hard shell wing

Siphonaptera: Fleas are small flightless insects that form the order Siphonaptera. As external parasites of mammals and birds, they live by consuming the blood of their hosts.