The diversification of flowering plants also has everything to do with their coevolution with insects. Plants, for example, evolved features like flowers with long tubes that could only be reached by long-tongued bees that pollinate them. This coevolution helped create an astonishing number of species: The vast majority of plants on Earth are flowering plants, and the vast majority of animals on Earth are insects.
By one estimate , insects alone account for 80 percent of all species on the planet. Yet insects, so successful on land, are marginal in the sea. Vermeij and Grosberg trace the lack of diversity among small animals to the differences in air and water as a medium.
Small animals, like an insect, have more difficulty moving around in water because it is thicker than air. This applies less so to bigger animals due to the laws of physics.
Sexual selection drives traits that may not seem beneficial but for whatever reasons are preferred by mates. Drawing on the work of Richard Strathmann, Vermeij and Grosberg also try to get at why something like the relationship between flowering plants and insects could not exist in the ocean. The seawater is teeming with potential food sources like zooplankton.
While going from one hypothetical sea flower to another, a marine creature would encounter plenty of food floating in the water along the way. Why swim all the way to the other sea flower? On the other hand, an insect flying from one flower with nectar to another would just be flying through air. There is no food floating in the air.
The study extracted DNA from snow samples collected within animal tracks and applied newly developed ScienceDaily shares links with sites in the TrendMD network and earns revenue from third-party advertisers, where indicated.
Print Email Share. Boy or Girl? Living Well. View all the latest top news in the environmental sciences, or browse the topics below:. Keyword: Search. While these statistics may sound daunting, they have not stopped the global scientific community from striving to amass as much knowledge as possible about ocean life. One recent effort— the Census of Marine Life —was an international project spanning 10 years that recorded the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the ocean.
More than 2, scientists from 80 nations contributed to the Census. The results of their research, which included marine expeditions, were reported at The Royal Society of London in October NOAA Fisheries is responsible for the protection, conservation, and recovery of endangered and threatened marine and estuarine species in the United States under the Endangered Species Act.
0コメント