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The phylogenetic inertia hypothesis suggests that this body plan is observed, not because it happens to be optimal, but because tetrapods are derived from a clade of fishes (Sarcopterygii) which also have four limbs. Four limbs happened to be suitable means of locomotion, and so this body plan has not been selected against.
In 1885 Ussov named Owsiannikov's "parasitic larva" Polypodium hydriforme and gave a morphological description of the parasite. [5] Polypodium was long considered a unique intracellular parasite among cnidarians. [6] [7] Its hosts include 14 species of Acipenser, 2 species of Huso, Polyodon spathula [6] and Scaphirhynchus platorynchus. [2]
The phyllosoma larva of spiny lobsters has a long planktonic life before metamorphosing into the puerulus stage, which is the transitional stage from planktonic to a benthic existence. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] Despite the importance of larval survival to predict recruitment, not much is known about the biology of phyllosoma larvae. [ 5 ]
Biological constraints are factors which make populations resistant to evolutionary change. One proposed definition of constraint is "A property of a trait that, although possibly adaptive in the environment in which it originally evolved, acts to place limits on the production of new phenotypic variants."
The result of these analyses is a phylogeny (also known as a phylogenetic tree) – a diagrammatic hypothesis about the history of the evolutionary relationships of a group of organisms. [6] Phylogenetic analyses have become central to understanding biodiversity, evolution, ecological genetics and genomes.
A particularly strict form of evolutionary systematics has been presented by Richard H. Zander in a number of papers, but summarized in his "Framework for Post-Phylogenetic Systematics". [ 13 ] Briefly, Zander's pluralistic systematics is based on the incompleteness of each of the theories: A method that cannot falsify a hypothesis is as ...
The evolution of tetrapods began about 400 million years ago in the Devonian Period with the earliest tetrapods evolved from lobe-finned fishes. [1] Tetrapods (under the apomorphy-based definition used on this page) are categorized as animals in the biological superclass Tetrapoda, which includes all living and extinct amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
Marine larval ecology is the study of the factors influencing dispersing larvae, which many marine invertebrates and fishes have. Marine animals with a larva typically release many larvae into the water column, where the larvae develop before metamorphosing into adults.