Growth rate, extinction and survival amongst late Cenozoic bivalves of the North Atlantic

Late Cenozoic bivalve extinction in the North Atlantic and adjacent areas has been attributed to environmental change (declines in temperature and primary production). Within scallops and oysters—bivalve groups with a high growth rate—certain taxa which grew exceptionally fast became extinct, while others which grew slower survived. The taxa which grew exceptionally fast would have obtained protection from predators thereby, so their extinction may have been due to the detrimental effect of environmental change on growth rate and ability to avoid predation, rather than environmental change per se. We investigated some glycymeridid and carditid bivalves—groups with a much lower growth rate than scallops and oysters—to see whether extinct forms from the late Cenozoic of the North Atlantic grew faster than extant forms, and hence whether their extinction may also have been mediated by increased mortality due to predation. Growth rate was determined from the cumulative width of annual increments in the hinge area; measurements were scaled up to overall shell size for the purposes of comparison with data from living species. Growth of the extinct glycymeridid Glycymeris subovata was at about the same rate as the slowest-growing living glycymeridid and much slower than in late Cenozoic samples of extant G. americana, in which growth was at about the same rate as the fastest-growing living glycymeridid. Growth of extinct G. obovata was also slower than G. americana, and that of the extinct carditid Cardites squamulosa ampla similarly slow (evidently slower than in the one living carditid species for which data are available). These findings indicate that within bivalve groups whose growth is much slower than scallops and oysters, extinction or survival of taxa through the late Cenozoic was not influenced by whether they were relatively fast or slow growers. By implication, environmental change acted directly to cause extinctions in slow-growing groups, rather than by increasing susceptibility to predation.University of Derby: URSS 2017-028, URSS 2017-02

Integrated information increases with fitness in the evolution of animats

One of the hallmarks of biological organisms is their ability to integrate disparate information sources to optimize their behavior in complex environments. How this capability can be quantified and related to the functional complexity of an organism remains a challenging problem, in particular since organismal functional complexity is not well-defined. We present here several candidate measures that quantify information and integration, and study their dependence on fitness as an artificial agent ("animat") evolves over thousands of generations to solve a navigation task in a simple, simulated environment. We compare the ability of these measures to predict high fitness with more conventional information-theoretic processing measures. As the animat adapts by increasing its "fit" to the world, information integration and processing increase commensurately along the evolutionary line of descent. We suggest that the correlation of fitness with information integration and with processing measures implies that high fitness requires both information processing as well as integration, but that information integration may be a better measure when the task requires memory. A correlation of measures of information integration (but also information processing) and fitness strongly suggests that these measures reflect the functional complexity of the animat, and that such measures can be used to quantify functional complexity even in the absence of fitness data.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures, one supplementary figure. Three supplementary video files available on request. Version commensurate with published text in PLoS Comput. Bio

Growth patterns of noetiid ligaments: implications of developmental models for the origin of an evolutionary novelty among arcoid bivalves

The dorsal ligaments of arcoid bivalves typically consist of oblique, lamellar and fibrous sheets, alternating along the hinge so that their attachments form characteristic chevron patterns. New elements are added at or near the middle of the pattern, as the ligament grows ventrally and gets longer. Most Palaeozoic arcoids exhibit this growth pattern, which still predominates among their living descendants. Early in the Cretaceous, a novel pattern emerged, with vertical strips of lamellar ligament embedded in grooves in the sheet of fibrous ligament which is attached to each valve. In contrast with the chevron, duplivincular ligament, new elements are added to each end of the noetiid ligament, anteriorly and posteriorly. This distinctive growth pattern is the defining character of the family Noetiidae. Remarkable variation among individuals within populations of a living limopsid arcoid includes Forms with vertical strips of lamellar ligament. These variants suggest how the noetiid growth pattern could have been derived from the duplivincular pattern. Computer simulations show that such patterns can be generated by a reaction-diffusion mechanism of the sort first conceived by Turing (1952, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London, Series B, 237, 37-72). Moreover. the noetiid growth pattern can simply be derived from the duplivincular pattern by a developmental switch based, for example, on a change in boundary conditions. These results indicate that striking differences in form may arise from modest changes in the developmental process. The evolution of the Noetiidae, members of which are quite disparate in overall shell form, should be reassessed. The derived character on which this Family is based may nor be uniquely shared, so the group could well be polyphyletic

The moving grid finite element method applied to biological problems

This paper presents a novel numerical technique, the moving grid finite element method, to solve generalised Turing [20] reaction-diffusion type models on continuously deforming growing domains. Applications to the development of bivalve ligaments and pigmentation colour patterns in the wing of the butterfly Papilio dardanus will be considered, by way of examples