A recent study suggests that insects branched out from crustaceans
smithsonianmag.com

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96 points

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Carrok

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7 days ago

95 comments

adrian_b ・ 7 days ago

The title should mention the 2023 year, as reference for "recent".

As explained in the article, this is actually old news.

There has been more than a decade since it is well known that the hexapods a.k.a. insects have evolved from within a certain group of crustaceans, which includes the water fleas.

The 2023 research paper linked in the article has only provided stronger evidence for this.

The main implication of this discovery is that the myriapods (e.g. millipedes and centipedes) are much more remotely related to insects than it has been believed in the past and they have adapted to a terrestrial life completely independently and much earlier than the insects (the invasion of the land by major animal groups has happened in the order myriapods, then arachnids, then hexapods a.k.a. insects, then tetrapod vertebrates, by a coincidence in decreasing order of the number of legs).

Imnimo ・ 7 days ago

I'm so used to seeing the "fish crawling onto the shore" cartoon of evolution that I assumed the branching always went that way - land creatures are branchoffs of sea creatures. But surely this is oversimplified - are there examples in the other direction, where a branching occured in land animals and one branch then returned to the sea?

  • showerst ・ 7 days ago

    I think all marine mammals fit this, right?

    • Calavar ・ 7 days ago

      Yes. And for a non animal example, there's sea grass, which evolved from land grasses.

      • SideburnsOfDoom ・ 7 days ago
        ・ 4 more

        And for an animal but non-mammal example, there are penguins.

        • addaon ・ 7 days ago
          ・ 3 more

          Sea snakes, as well.

          • riffraff ・ 7 days ago
            ・ 2 more

            And sea turtles, and I guess iguanas are a kind of sea lizard.

            • SideburnsOfDoom ・ 7 days ago

              > iguanas are a kind of sea lizard

              Only the marine iguanas, but yes.

              Also salt-water crocodiles (the largest living reptile).

      • nonameiguess ・ 7 days ago

        Mangroves are aquatic trees that evolved from regular land trees.

      • nyanpasu64 ・ 7 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        Sea grass is a monocot but belongs to a different order (Alismatales) than true grass (Poales).

        • Calavar ・ 7 days ago

          Thanks for the correction. Interesting

  • maxbond ・ 7 days ago

    Not an animal, but many marine algae descend from freshwater algae, possibly because the last Snowball Earth event may have wiped out the marine algae by covering the oceans with ice (while freshwater algae survived in structures like cryoconites, tiny freshwater puddles that form on glaciers).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0R3FVTLvT0

    (People who know their taxonomy will notice that I'm conflating algae and cyanobacteria, mea culpa.)

  • nn3 ・ 7 days ago

    There are also lots of extinct examples like Ichthyosaurs, Mosasaurs, Plesiosaurs

    Modern examples are saltwater crocodiles, sea turtles or sea snakes

  • nyanpasu64 ・ 7 days ago

    > Hyraxes have highly charged myoglobin, which has been inferred to reflect an aquatic ancestry.[20]

    • lmpdev ・ 7 days ago

      Interesting thing about the evolution of Hyraxes is that it is likely to be an example of a Hard Polytomy - as in Hyraxes, Elephants and Manatees split off simultaneously

  • yndoendo ・ 7 days ago

    Hippos come from the whale branch. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whippomorpha

    • elevaet ・ 7 days ago

      Hippos don't come from the whale branch, but they share a branch with whales. From wikipedia:

      > It is unknown whether the last common ancestor of whales and hippos led an aquatic, semiaquatic/amphibious, or terrestrial lifestyle

      However, whales are a great example of a clade that went land -> water in their evolutionary history.

  • dcminter ・ 7 days ago

    Whales are the first example that springs to mind.

abeindoria ・ 7 days ago

I strongly suggest reading Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish" which explains a bit more on how different bits etc evolved if you're interested in the topic.

dboreham ・ 7 days ago

Makes sense: a coastal cave is a great environment where an organism can experiment with moving from water to land.

This article also nicely highlights how some scientists can just make stuff up, subsequently overturned when someone finds a fact-based way to evaluate their erroneous conclusions. See also archeology.

nmstoker ・ 7 days ago

For a fairly science focused article I was a little surprised they referred to "bugs" in the casual / technically incorrect manner, as covered here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect#Distinguishing_featur...

  • nescioquid ・ 7 days ago

    As a lay-person who likes to read about bugs, I've come to expect the qualifier "true" to connote something special about bug's "mouth parts".

  • dhosek ・ 7 days ago

    “Bats: Bug Scourge of the Skies!“

willis936 ・ 7 days ago

I suspect crustacean allergies are actually arthropod allergies. I haven't seen much research on this though.

  • xipho ・ 7 days ago

    I suspect arthropods are way too diverse to fall under a single umbrella of "is_allergic". Millions of years of evolution can produce very radically different things for our bodies to worry about. Just the fact that there are no marine insects (completing their lifecycle within an ocean) tells us something about how different their biologies, and therefor allergenic "surface" are. Poison pathways from venom can target completely different systems in a humans.

    • andrewflnr ・ 7 days ago

      Almost no marine insects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halobates

      Re lifecycle:

      > The coastal species lay their eggs close to the water surface on rocks, plants, and other structures near the shore, while the oceanic species attach their egg masses on floating objects such as cuttlebone and feathers.

      • xipho ・ 6 days ago
        ・ 3 more

        I know of Halobates, they live on top the ocean, not in the ocean. I.e. they have no adaptations to breathe in salt water. There are many other species like this that are restricted to tidal (flies, parasitic wasps, etc.) or costal areas and nowhere else, but again, not under water.

        • andrewflnr ・ 6 days ago
          ・ 2 more

          Even their nymphs?

          • xipho ・ 5 days ago

            Right, they are not underwater. Hemimetaboulous insects like Holobates look like baby adults when they are born, and undergo multiple "partial" metamorphosis. In this case their wings are almost non-existent. They will go through multiple molts, gradually looking more like the adult. Holometabolous insects (e.g. beetles, wasps, butterflies, flies) are the ones with radically different body plans, often exploiting different niches, the larva could be aquatic, the pupa and adult terrestrial. Some more "basal" insects (dragonflies, mayflies) also have different body-plans at different stages, though instead of "larva" we say "imago", and things like that, for those lineages.

    • willis936 ・ 6 days ago

      Okay but they both have exoskeletons that have many shared proteins. Allergies are just a protein check.

  • echelon ・ 7 days ago

    It's an allergic reaction to tropomyosin, which is found in shellfish and cockroaches.

    I recall an anecdote of an entomologist who studied cockroaches in particular claiming to have developed a shellfish allergy from her work.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropomyosin

    • saghm ・ 7 days ago

      If this were a sci-fi movie, it would be because the cockroaches were sentient and trying to protect themselves.

  • senkora ・ 6 days ago

    People with shellfish allergies are generally advised to avoid eating crickets for this reason.

anigbrowl ・ 7 days ago

I'm surprised to learn anyone thought otherwise.

  • pfdietz ・ 7 days ago

    The previous theory, it seems to me, is that crustaceans and insects were separate -- that is, they shared a common ancestor, but each is a clade. The new idea is that insects are slotted inside the larger tree of crustaceans, and are more related to some crustaceans than to others.

fallat ・ 7 days ago

This seems so obvious

  • CommenterPerson ・ 7 days ago

    Biology was always a mystery in college, but I have also felt that this was obvious. They look very similar for heaven's sake! My paranoid self thinks shrimp, crabs and lobsters are labeled differently from bugs, so people can eat them without being repulsed.

  • andrewflnr ・ 7 days ago

    Compared to the alternative that, IIRC, insects are closer to myriapods? Crustaceans aren't the only crunchy animals, even after this reorganization.

dang ・ 7 days ago

[stub for offtopicness]

  • jliptzin ・ 7 days ago

    Smithsonian funding must really be drying up if they have to assault me with 40 pop up ads per sentence

    • dang ・ 7 days ago

      "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

      It's not that these things aren't annoying—they of course are. But that's actually why we have that guideline.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

  • carabiner ・ 7 days ago

    [flagged]

    • danielbln ・ 7 days ago

      I try to avoid having any bugs, sea or land.

    • Loughla ・ 7 days ago

      Honestly if they taste like shrimp, I'm down. Shrimps are delicious.

      • carabiner ・ 7 days ago

        I might try roasted palm grubs. I don't know where you can find them in the US.

  • throwaway-blaze ・ 7 days ago

    Please point us at the land-bugs with a taste profile like shrimp / lobster / crab / other edible crustaceans enjoyed by humans.

    • LPisGood ・ 7 days ago

      I think the biggest problem is how small land-bugs are. They don’t have a large chunk you meat you can yoink out and grill; you have to eat the shell.

    • lysace ・ 7 days ago

      The colder temperatures of their new environment might have made them tastier to us. Also, salt.

      I find shrimp from the cold north sea (Pandalus Borealis) a lot more tastier than the much larger shrimp found in more temperate seas.

    • flysand7 ・ 7 days ago

      Shrimp are mostly tasteless though, aren't they? If you bite into a shrimp and really pay attention to the taste, you'd notice that it's not really a "taste" that you're feeling, but mostly the soft texture giving the illusion of tastiness.

      • kupopuffs ・ 7 days ago

        And the fat. there's some shrimp with a lot of fat. Which is really just a platform for other great flavors

      • Zardoz89 ・ 7 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        Shrimp taste. Go net some shrimp, filet them alive and eat them, guts removed. Report your finding.

        • airstrike ・ 7 days ago

          Why do they have to be alive while you filet them?

      • panarky ・ 7 days ago

        Shrimp and lobster are really just delivery devices for butter, garlic, lemon, etc.

    • andrewflnr ・ 7 days ago

      I've seen people claim that they actually do taste very similar if you can isolate the insect's muscle, but usually insects are eaten with their exoskeleton, which changes the flavor.

      • belorn ・ 7 days ago

        Is there insects with a similar tail muscle of a shrimp? The muscle is evolved to push water in order to create propulsion. The only thing that I can think f that seems similar would be snakes.

    • dboreham ・ 7 days ago

      Lobster tasting good is a construct. 200 years ago lobster was the lowest peasant food that nobody with the money to buy other food would touch.

      • burkaman ・ 7 days ago
        ・ 3 more

        I think this is sort of a myth. There was a relatively brief period of time in the US when lobster was considered poor people's food, but in the rest of the world and the rest of history it has generally been very popular and often associated with the upper class.

        - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster#History

        I also think it's pretty common for historical "peasant" foods to be popular today, like tacos or potatoes for example. If anything, "poor people love it but rich people won't touch it" is probably evidence that the thing not tasting good is a social construct.

        • conductr ・ 7 days ago
          ・ 2 more

          Poor people have an incentive to find ways to make unwanted (aka cheap/available) food taste good, this simple fact is responsible for peasant food all over the world being generally amazing and why even a lot of upper class dishes have some origin as a lower class food.

          I’m in Texas and we’re pretty well known for brisket and fajitas which are sourced from fatty/undesirable cuts of beef.

          • pfdietz ・ 6 days ago

            I've always been surprised how good the "bad" cuts become when cooked long and moist to convert the cartilage to gelatin.

      • cortesoft ・ 7 days ago

        I think lobster tasting good is mostly about the amount of butter used.

        Really, though, a lot of it has to do with food preservation technology - lobster only tastes good fresh, and goes bad very quickly (which is why you will often see them alive in tanks at the grocery store, and they are often cooked alive). Before we had the tech to either keep them alive before cooking or refrigerate immediately, they didn't taste very good.

      • ziddoap ・ 7 days ago
        ・ 9 more

        >Lobster tasting good is a construct.

        I'm not really sure what this even means. I enjoy the taste of lobster, and the fact that it is no longer peasant food doesn't play any part in that.

        • saghm ・ 7 days ago

          I think the point is that given the right social dynamics, some bugs that already are edible today could probably be considered fancy and tasty in a century or two. I might be the wrong person to ask though because I already find pretty much all seafood nauseating.

        • jamster02 ・ 7 days ago
          ・ 7 more

          The fact that it is no longer peasant food doesn't consciously play any part in that.

          • ziddoap ・ 7 days ago
            ・ 5 more

            I ate lobster maybe 100+ times (and enjoyed it) before I learned that it used to be peasant food.

            • suriya-ganesh ・ 7 days ago

              I think what the parent comment is saying is that, lobster was likely introduced as an elite/rare dish to people in the current century increasing the appeal

            • cortesoft ・ 7 days ago
              ・ 3 more

              That is exactly the point they are trying to make... that you enjoyed it BECAUSE you thought of it as a delicacy and not as peasant food.

              I think the point is a little overwrought, really... while our expectation is part of what makes it taste good, it doesn't completely change what we think... there are a lot of foods that are considered delicacies that a lot of people don't like.

              • ziddoap ・ 7 days ago
                ・ 2 more

                >that you enjoyed it BECAUSE you thought of it as a delicacy and not as peasant food

                When I was a child, I didn't even know the word "delicacy" let alone have any concept of whether what I was eating was a delicacy or not.

                • cortesoft ・ 7 days ago

                  Like I said, I disagree with the person's overall thesis, just pointing out what they were trying to say.

          • IOT_Apprentice ・ 7 days ago

            Does that mean JD Vance will consume it? :)

      • tester457 ・ 7 days ago

        Therefore with the right preparation some bugs might become delicacies.

      • burnished ・ 7 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        No, we cooked it like shit. It gets rubbery and unpleasant real quick.

        • maxerickson ・ 7 days ago

          It was also wildly abundant.

epicureanideal ・ 7 days ago

Is this part of an "eat bugs" marketing push?

"Bugs are just miniature lobsters". If anything, makes me not want to eat crustaceans.