that reminds me: why are there so few insects in the ocean?

[eub]

 

Comments

[dr4b]

Rainbows are visions, but only illusions,
And rainbows have nothing to hide.

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

:)

[eub.livejournal.com]

Someday we'll find it, the deep-sea insect hive?

literal answer

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Because (1) they evolved on land -- no gills, wings that are no use underwater, whole medium transfer ahead of them -- and (2) crustaceans appear in the fossil record about when trilobites do, way earlier than insects evolved, and they, being kickass creatures, have occupied the oceanic arthropod niches.

[chaoticgoodnik.livejournal.com]

One of my college roommates used to go off on this big rant about how lobsters etc. were water insects. For some reason, it invariably made me spit whatever I was drinking on the monitor.

Re: literal answer

[eub.livejournal.com]

So I guess the question I should be asking is "why haven't the crustaceans taken over the land?", which they have in fact done a reasonable job at.

Interestingly, some people think that wings came from ancestral gills at some point along the line.

We have isolated crustacean homologues of two genes that have wing-specific functions in insects, pdm (nubbin) and apterous. Their expression patterns support the hypothesis that insect wings evolved from gill-like appendages that were already present in the aquatic ancestors of both crustaceans and insects.

I can't think of any insects that I know stay underwater, without coming up for air. Oh, hellgrammites I think. Other larvae? Not mosquito.

[fuzzycoffeebean.livejournal.com]

There is much debate over this question. Here is a website that provides simplified summaries (it's a resource for teachers) of the hypotheses for the marine insect question:

http://entomology.unl.edu/lgh/marine_insects/marinehome.html

So, no, it's not entirely understood why after millions of years of adaptive radiation there are only a handful of oceanic insect species. And even still these species live on the water/air interface.

[eub.livejournal.com]

Hi, thanks for dropping in.

Interesting counterexamples to some of the hypotheses. The bloodworms of abyssal Baikal are way cool.

Hm, competitive exclusion is all very well when talking about a single niche and two species, but here we have a whole array of oceanic niches, and a whole array of terrestial ones, and two subphylum(?)-level groupings of species. Competitive exclusion as I understand it would have nothing to say against oceanic niches being parceled out some to crustaceans, some to insects -- freshwater niches are parceled out something like that. I can see as how exclusion might generalize to the larger scales too, but... yeah, "not entirely understood" sounds fitting.

[eub.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid it makes me think of eating pillbugs.