Palaeo After Dark

The gang discusses two papers on suction feeding among tetrapods, the process by which animals take in water to pull food into their mouths. Specifically they look at two papers showing suction feeding strategies in fossil whales and in modern auks. Meanwhile, Amanda finds new ways to become ill, James finds new things to get angry about, and Curt makes new, very unfortunate deviant art searches.

 

Up-Goer Five (James Edition):

The group look at two papers that deal with animals that suck. The first paper is looking at how animals with hair that live in the place where water can not be drunk got big. One of the thing that these really big animals share is that they eat lots of little food all at once by pushing it through a brush, and it is thought that they got big because they could push so much food through their brush at once that they could eat lots and lots. The study looks at the hard parts of a really old hair covered water animal that got very big, but it does not have the brush and so could not eat lots of small food. Instead, it seems like the animal would have got its food by sucking, and ate lots of food that was not too big but not too small instead by sucking it into their mouth and then pushing the water out. This shows that these animals could get big without pushing lots of small food through a brush, and that the brush pushing eating might have come from sucking first.

The second paper takes small animals that can fly and live on the big water that you can not drink and sees how they ate. These animals eat very small animals as their food and people have looked inside them and found out that they would need to eat a lot of these small animals in order to live. It was said that these flying animals must have eaten lots of small animals at once by pushing them through a small space like a brush like the really big animals that live if the big water you can not drink do, however no one has ever seen these flying animals eat. The study takes some of these flying animals and keeps them in a room with lots of water for a while that is full of their food and watches how they eat. It turns out that these flying animals suck too, and they suck up their small food by seeing them and sucking them in one or a few at a time. This sucking is just like the sucking that the old really big animal with hair and no legs would have done. This also suggests that the flying animals do not need to eat quite as much as the people that looked inside them thought.

 

References: 

Enstipp, Manfred R., et al. "Almost like a whale–First evidence of suction-feeding in a seabird." Journal of Experimental Biology (2018): jeb-182170. 

 Fordyce, R. Ewan, and Felix G. Marx. "Gigantism precedes filter feeding in baleen whale evolution." Current Biology(2018). 

Direct download: Podcast_139_-_Whales_and_Birds_Suck.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am EDT

The gang discuss two papers that use various lines of evidence to try to determine what Cambrian animals (particularly trilobites) might have eaten. Which of these animals were detritivores or coprophagous, and which animals might have been active predators? Meanwhile, James tries to keep a schedule, Amanda finds a way to time travel 10 minutes, and Curt fights against nature.

 

Up-Goer Five (Amanda Edition):

Today our friends talk about very old things with no inside hard bits that ate shit and also how stomachs grow in cute round hard animals with lots of parts. The papers look at very old times and how all things are put together living in the same place and how they all work together in this place and time. At first our friends talk about pieces of shit that show how very old things with no inside hard bits ate food and how that means they fit into this place and time. The shit is found in the ends of where the very old things with no inside hard bits lived. There are other animals found with the shit that might be eating the shit or also might be part of the shit, meaning that the very old things with no inside hard bits ate them. They also say that these pieces of shit that have a different kind of animal that has not been well known until not long ago means that these different animals were more like a good-to-eat animal than a not-good-to-eat animal. One of our friends falls asleep but it is not because the paper is not fun. Then our friends talk about how the head-stomach gets bigger in these cute round animals with lots of parts. They think a bigger head-stomach means that these cute round animals with lots of parts ate other animals and not just stuff on the ground. 

 

References:

Lerosey‐Aubril, Rudy, and John S. Peel. "Gut evolution in early Cambrian trilobites and the origin of predation on infaunal macroinvertebrates: evidence from muscle scars in Mesolenellus." Palaeontology (2018). 

 Kimmig, Julien, and Brian R. Pratt. "Coprolites in the Ravens Throat River LAGERSTÄTTE of Northwestern Canada: Implications for the Middle Cambrian Food Web." Palaios 33.4 (2018): 125-140. 

Direct download: Podcast_138_-_Cambrian_Food.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am EDT

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