http://abc.zoo.ox.ac.uk/Papers/currbiol04_neotenous.pdf

I just mentioned this over in Physiology and Biology, but I thought it was cool enough to possibly spark discussion over here...

(oops, I said octopi instead of octopuses, but I guess you can't edit thread titles)

(oops, I said octopi instead of octopuses, but I guess you can't edit thread titles)

... and bethic instead of benthic ..... Tsk tsk

Oh, I thought it was relating to KISS's song "Beth".

... and bethic instead of benthic ..... Tsk tsk

Just goes to show what happens when an ignorant computer scientist tries to play biologist... :oops:

It makes sense as neotony is fairly common (have you read the Larry Niven story about ostriches being neotinous rocs?). This makes me wonder if there are any species that are differentiated - part of the population neotonous and part going on to a benthic lifestyle. I know this takes place in some amphibians so it would no be out of the question for cephs

It is possible that Architeuthis is just a neotonic onychoteuthid (like Moroteuthis , Onychoteuthis, Kondakovia) - something that retained all of those paralarval Moroteuthis-like characters/character states and never developed the hooks on the tentacle clubs. The more I look at the morphology of this animal the more inclined that I am to believe it; genetically they are not that dissimilar either.

Just goes to show what happens when an ignorant computer scientist tries to play biologist... :oops:

You're doing fine; I was just giving you a hard time (most people write bethnic instead - yours was an interesting departure from the norm). Just be grateful that I don't delve into computer science; my wife has long-since given up on me, trying to teach me something other than word processing (she teaches computing somethingorother); I don't trust anything that I cannot dissect or cannot feed, and computers are at the top of that list!

Very interesting.

I don't trust anything that I cannot dissect or
cannot feed, and computers are at the top of that list!

Dissecting them is easy, and is cleaner and less offensive to olfaction than most of the stuff you do. Feeding them is even simpler (you just plug 'em in, Steve :wink:).

You're doing fine; I was just giving you a hard time (most people write bethnic instead - yours was an interesting departure from the norm). Just be grateful that I don't delve into computer science; my wife has long-since given up on me, trying to teach me something other than word processing (she teaches computing somethingorother); I don't trust anything that I cannot dissect or cannot feed, and computers are at the top of that list!

Not to worry, I don't mind being given a hard time occasionally... and benthic is actually a word I ostensibly actually know. I do, however, have great respect for the amount of encyclopedic knowledge that biologists and chemists need to keep in mind... that was really the biggest thing that kept me from doing bio as a double major.

For what it's worth, I also feel your pain about computers; I'm somewhat ashamed of the computer professionals in acadamia and industry both, since they've managed to screw up implementations enough that the amount of crap you need to learn to feel comfortable is ridiculous, and of course goes out of date quickly. And unlike biology or chemistry, the crap you need to learn to use computers tends to be completely arbitrary, and not interesting from a standpoint of understanding any big picture. (Although I guess they do "re-write the book" in a lot of biology fields every couple of years...)

For me, a lot of the fun (and useful) stuff is in cross-disciplinary work, anyway, so I enjoy learning enough to talk about marine biology (or neuroscience, or orbital dynamics, or whatever) to talk intelligently with "real scientists," so that I can do work where I can collaborate with an assortment of people and can understand the problems computers could help them solve, and leverage my understanding on the computer end to get them the results they want in their specialty area-- I see way to many computer weenies who try to fit problems into their limited scope rather than try to really understand the goals and concerns of the people they're writing software for... :yinyang:

*ooooooh* Makes me feel so warm and fuzzy inside when someone fuses molecular phylogeny with paleontology... 8-)

Great paper, Monty. The neoteny doesn't surprise me so much as the amount of work these guys went through in order to do this work.

Sometimes, along certain phyla, paedomorphic characterists lead to a reduction in body "complexity" (I really hate using that term), and these researchers have done a good job in pointing that out. What I would have liked was an embryological comparison with more closey related species, but this looks good.

Any further thoughts?

John

hi guys,
what has happened to benthonic & benthal ?
Is my thesaurus cack ?

Keef

It is possible that Architeuthis is just a neotonic onychoteuthid (like Moroteuthis , Onychoteuthis, Kondakovia) - something that retained all of those paralarval Moroteuthis-like characters/character states and never developed the hooks on the tentacle clubs. The more I look at the morphology of this animal the more inclined that I am to believe it; genetically they are not that dissimilar either.

:shock:
Archi is just a larva?
What would the adult look like, a boomer with tentacles? lol.
just kidding

Is my thesaurus cack ?
Hiya Sparty Farty bell bottom (long time no converse), I'm not quite sure; I have to ask you whether 'cack' is a derivative of kakka .... just out of curiosity?

:shock: Archi is just a larva?

Many people have asked me from what has 'Architeuthis evolved'. I have come to believe that its closest ancestor (extant) is something akin to an onychoteuthid. I don't know what the polarity of relationship is, but it is probably onychoteuthid to architeuthid rather than the other way around, due to the similarity in paralarval morphology, and the absence of hooks on the tentacle club in Architeuthis (common to all onychoteuthids, and a hard character to 'reinvent' [in terms of parsimony]).