Phylogeny - Tumblr Posts
We are all fish
And
Fish isn't a real thing
Are two statements that can and should and DO coexist
A global phylogeny of butterflies reveals their evolutionary history, ancestral hosts and biogeographic origins
Kawahara, Storer, Carhalho, et al.
ABSTRACT
Butterflies are a diverse and charismatic insect group that are thought to have evolved with plants and dispersed throughout the world in response to key geological events.
However, these hypotheses have not been extensively tested because a comprehensive phylogenetic framework and datasets for butterfly larval hosts and global distributions are lacking.
We sequenced 391 genes from nearly 2,300 butterfly species, sampled from 90 countries and 28 specimen collections, to reconstruct a new phylogenomic tree of butterflies representing 92% of all genera.
Our phylogeny has strong support for nearly all nodes and demonstrates that at least 36 butterfly tribes require reclassification. Divergence time analyses imply an origin ~100 million years ago for butterflies and indicate that all but one family were present before the K/Pg extinction event.
We aggregated larval host datasets and global distribution records and found that butterflies are likely to have first fed on Fabaceae and originated in what is now the Americas. Soon after the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, butterflies crossed Beringia and diversified in the Palaeotropics.
Our results also reveal that most butterfly species are specialists that feed on only one larval host plant family. However, generalist butterflies that consume two or more plant families usually feed on closely related plants.
Read more:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-023-02041-9
I love phylogenetics because you expect something like this (Tarpon)
To be related to this (Milkfish, or herring in general)
But turns out it’s more closely related to eels (due to a stroke of luck that most of their other relatives presumably died out, therefore their respective orders and only a handful of other make up the extant survivors). (Pic: European Eel)
And you’d expect these (Anthias: Hawk Anthias and Lyretail Anthias)
To be related to this (Chromis, or damselfish in general)
But they’re actually related to groupers (Goliath Grouper)
the only bad part about going to the zoo is hearing adult men confidently tell their kids or gfs objectively incorrect information about the animals we’re looking at and having to remain silent. do u know the restraint it takes to say nothing when a grown adult man tells someone “falcons are in the same family as eagles” next to me? no babygirl. no.
"The common bat (Bat bat) is a small bat microbat"
this bat is the most bat of any bat ever
absolute maximum quantity of bat in this guy
I’d like to draw attention to this tag, because I’m a nerd
They are right! There IS no such thing as a fish! Sharks and trout, for example, are both considered fish, but trout are MUCH more closely related to humans than they are to sharks, making “fish” an invalid classificatory group (and don’t even get me started on lampreys)
It has come to my attention some people want to get me started on the lampreys
Lampreys are a member of the infraphylum Agnatha, meaning they are “jawless fish.” They literally don’t have jaw bones. Instead they have horrific, nightmarish mouths that look like giant, tooth-lined plungers.
They prove just how fake the term “fish” really is. Scientifically, we can only consider something a clade if it includes a common ancestor and ALL of its descendants. (This means that it’s not a scientifically valid group if all of its descendants aren’t in it.)
So, what does that mean? Well. If our jawless fish friends, lampreys and hagfish, are fish, that means every single Gnathostome is a fish.
Gnathostomes are… jawed vertebrates.
As such, tuna, alligators, frogs, raccoons, cats, and people are also fish.
I’d like to draw attention to this tag, because I’m a nerd
They are right! There IS no such thing as a fish! Sharks and trout, for example, are both considered fish, but trout are MUCH more closely related to humans than they are to sharks, making “fish” an invalid classificatory group (and don’t even get me started on lampreys)
Studying evolution is awesome until you have to generate your own phylogenies.
So, uh, I was bored one day, and uhhhhh… it spiralled slightly out of control lol. Please don’t take this as any sort of scientific diagram, as there were a good few logical leaps made since this was primarily for my own satisfaction and nothing else