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Questions that don't need their own topics vol.2; New and fresh
Topic Started: Jan 4 2018, 11:18 AM (26,848 Views)
IIGSY
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Russwallac
Jun 9 2018, 01:50 PM
GreatAuk
Jun 9 2018, 12:50 PM
Why can’t cephalopod go into freshwater? And why can’t amphibians go into salt water?
Cephalopods lack sodium pumps and have open respiratory systems
Actually, cephalopods have closed systems
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opeFool
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Russwallac
Jun 9 2018, 01:50 PM
GreatAuk
Jun 9 2018, 12:50 PM
Why can’t cephalopod go into freshwater? And why can’t amphibians go into salt water?
Cephalopods lack sodium pumps and have open respiratory systems, so they'd lose salt and die. Amphibians have permeable skin, so they'd die from from too much salt. There is a species of frog that can tolerate brackish or salty water, but not indefinitely.
So do cephalopods lack membrane-bound protein sodium pumps or are these a different type of pump?
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CaledonianWarrior96
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How easy or long would it take for deep-sea fish species to adapt to life in the epi-mesopelagic zones, provided we ignore competition from other fish in this zone?

For this question I'll be referring to depths below 1km as deep sea since Mesopelagic sort of fits into deep sea as well and I'm referring to inhabitants of the bathypelagic zone and below that
Edited by CaledonianWarrior96, Jun 14 2018, 05:42 AM.
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Mynameisnotdave23
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Just wondering, but what's the largest an island-living bird can be and still be considered plausible?
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Avisia, an island archipelago isolated for over 88 million years, and is know home to megafaunal birds, mekosuchine crocodiles, and many relics. (currently in infancy)
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island limit growth to a point ,bird overall have a problem with having short tails for valance but IDKa were the limit lays
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Bob-The-Seagull-King
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In regards to the amphibian question, the reason they can't tolerate salt water is because the surrounding water is, because of the salts, hypertonic to the animal's cells, causing their body water to flow out of them and into the ocean (same reason that drinking seawater dehydrates you rather than hydrating you) with the amphibians very porous skin making it a real danger to the animal because of how easily water flows to/from the skin. I don't think this prevents any amphibians from ever being in salt water, they'd just need a way to ensure their cells aren't hyper/hypotonic to the water around them. Reason there aren't any oceanic amphibians is there hasn't been any evolutionary pressure for an amphibious animal to evolve into something that only lives in the ocean (which is where most of the salt water is).
Edited by Bob-The-Seagull-King, Jun 14 2018, 04:44 PM.
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Rodlox
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Mynameisnotdave23
Jun 14 2018, 03:24 PM
Just wondering, but what's the largest an island-living bird can be and still be considered plausible?
moas, elephant birds, demon ducks of doom...what sort of island?
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Mynameisnotdave23
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Rodlox
Jun 14 2018, 05:56 PM
Mynameisnotdave23
Jun 14 2018, 03:24 PM
Just wondering, but what's the largest an island-living bird can be and still be considered plausible?
moas, elephant birds, demon ducks of doom...what sort of island?
Like a Madagascar-sized one.
Projects


Avisia, an island archipelago isolated for over 88 million years, and is know home to megafaunal birds, mekosuchine crocodiles, and many relics. (currently in infancy)
Read here: http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/8192410/2/#new

Deviantart: https://mynameisnotdave23.deviantart.com/
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LittleLazyLass
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At that size you're less limited by the island and more by how big one can make a bird in general.
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CaledonianWarrior96
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Mynameisnotdave23
Jun 14 2018, 06:33 PM
Rodlox
Jun 14 2018, 05:56 PM
Mynameisnotdave23
Jun 14 2018, 03:24 PM
Just wondering, but what's the largest an island-living bird can be and still be considered plausible?
moas, elephant birds, demon ducks of doom...what sort of island?
Like a Madagascar-sized one.
Fairly certain that elephant birds got as big as they could on Madagascar, which seemed to have been close to the known upper limit birds could reach, so I'd say an elephant bird sized... bird.

Actually relating to this question, how tall could a bird actually reach before its height becomes an issue such as balance problems and related problems? The animal does not necessarily have to be a heavy animal; think of it as the giraffes of birds. I also had an idea for terrestrial stork-like animal that could be a predator of arboreal animals that it would pluck from trees like how giraffes probes trees for succulent leaves and thought of them reaching heights of +5 metres (with the bill providing greater height when reared upwards)
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- Official Project
- Foundation
The Beryoni Galaxy: The Biologically Rich and Politically Complex State of our Galaxy (Habitational Zone)

- Beryoni Critique Thread (formerly: Aliens of Beryoni)
The Ecology of Skull Island: An Open Project for the Home of King Kong (Alternative Universe)
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Nyarlathotep
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Moas were much Lankier proportionally than even giraffes, and whole no bird except maybe Dromornis exceeded the elephant birds, bird-like dinosaurs like Gigantoraptor could be pretty impressive. It depends on what environmental limits there are and how you want them to develop.
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Cool_Hippo43
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many questions but all on the same topic ...

by what I know the theory of endosymbiosis says that there was an ancestral Prokaryote that phagocytosed an aerobic bacterium (mitochondria) and originated all heterotrophic eukaryotic beings ...
but one of these heterotrophic ekariotics phagocytosed a photosynthetic prokaryon (cyanobacteria?) and gave rise to all eukaryotic things that make photosynthesis.
however, the other prokaryotes that did not phagocyte mitochondria continued to exist and turned the bacteria and archeas. some make chemiosynthesis (right?) and others phagocytose other things and ferment ...?

now for the main question; if we can deduce that we had 3 groups of basal prokaryotes in a very distant past (cyanobaterias, aerobic mitochondria and phagocytic bacteria), and that from the junction of these 3 groups all eukariotics arose; I can deduce that for example, proto-cyanobacteria (the same ones that were phagocytosed) could evolve separately without endosynbiosis and become a new clade of photosynthetic organisms? or that aerobic bacteria (which would one day turn mitochondria) could also evolve into a new group of organisms in isolation?


and


are chemosynthetic organisms prokaryotes (bacteria / archeas) or are eukaryotes? can they evolve into multicellular organisms, or can they be a prokariotic bacterium?
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Holben
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Cyanobacteria are fully capable of photosynthesis. Prochlorococcus is considered to be the most abundant photosynthesiser (by population) on the planet.

Mitochondria are a kind of Alphaproteobacterium, the others in that class have gone off to do a wide variety of things. Their closest relatives are free-living bacteria that live in oceanic surface waters, doing perfectly fine without a eukaryotic host.

There are no known chemoautotrophic eukaryotes.
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

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Cool_Hippo43
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Holben
Jun 15 2018, 04:01 PM
Cyanobacteria are fully capable of photosynthesis. Prochlorococcus is considered to be the most abundant photosynthesiser (by population) on the planet.

Mitochondria are a kind of Alphaproteobacterium, the others in that class have gone off to do a wide variety of things. Their closest relatives are free-living bacteria that live in oceanic surface waters, doing perfectly fine without a eukaryotic host.

There are no known chemoautotrophic eukaryotes.
Okay, so my interpretation on endosymbiosis is correct?
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Holben
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Cool_Hippo43
Jun 15 2018, 04:12 PM
Okay, so my interpretation on endosymbiosis is correct?
Yeah, an organism similar to the Asgard Archaea joined with a protomitochondrion over 1.6 billion years ago (maybe 2.3 billion), and some of those eukaryotes also picked up a cyanobacterium, which must have been before 1.9 billion years ago (possibly 2.1 billion). AFAIK the current dates don't make the order clear, but there's good genetic evidence mitochondria came first.

Though, interestingly, cyanobacteria have gone through endosymbiosis in another lineage much more recently. Paulinella chromatophora, an amoeba, picked up a cyanobacterium and developed chloroplasts independently about 100 million years ago.
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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