Lecture 22 Retracting Steps

Aquatic angiosperms and mammals

Opening sequence was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuVgXJ55G6Y: illustrates intelligence/play/culture in marine mammals.

The aim of this lecture is partly to retrace our steps through the lecture unit to help your
revision, but also to show how evolution (and the abundance of water) has prompted life on
this planet to do the same thing. Both of today’s focus groups – flowering plants and
mammals evolved on land, and both are characterised by profound simplifications on entry to
the aquatic habitat.

Angiosperms.
Just as meadows of grasses dominate many terrestrial landscapes, sea grasses dominate
many marine coastal habitats, especially Australasia. There are >50 species and sea
grasses can dominate the sea bed and provide the basis for rich biodiversity. Shark Bay in
Australia has 4,000km2 covered by sea grasses [movie] - keystone species in
muddy/silty/sandy coastal areas including Majorca [you will probably visit one such area if
you attend the Majorca field course BIOL10622]. Terrestrial mammals like ourselves usually
only notice these beds when violent weather causes detachment of parts of rhizome and
leaves – the plants are usually anchored in the substratum, ensuring stability and build up of
sediment.

Flowering, pollination and fertilisation is reliant on sea water, not animals or wind as in
terrestrial angiosperms (see handout and, if interested in plants, or biodiversity in general see
http://www.sms.si.edu/irlspec/ComparAlgae_Seagr.htm and the rest of the site for optional further reading and
the answer to the questions posed about the mistakes in the newspaper article handed out in
the first lecture – “seaweeds” usually means algae, not flowering plants, and the genus is
Zostera, not Sostera).

Sea grass pollen tends to be modified, some species have elongated thread-like pollen (up to
3mm long). These get entangled in the elongated female stigmas [handout]. Others have
flowers that do emerge from the water (see my Nov 2013 BSR article on seagrasses on
Blackboard).

Seagrass beds are exceptionally important ecosystems, they are considered to be the third
most valuable ecosystem globally as they have high productivity (they are nurseries for fish,
prawns etc.); they stabilise coastal sediments and filter run-off from the land (thus protecting
the rest of the marine environment from damaging chemicals and eutrophication, but many
seagrasses are threatened). (Anyone interested in conservation or biodiversity in general,
and environmental scientists might like to read more and watch the movie in
http://www.seagrasswatch.org/seagrass.html). Since the 1980s it is estimated that we are losing
about two football pitches worth of seagrass meadows every hour to coastal development.

Mammals.
Where there is terrestrial grass there are cows to eat it. “Sea cows” are just one of the
groups of animals that rely on sea grass meadows. Dugongs [movie] and manatees are in
order Sirenia (from the greek word for mermaid)[Table 34.41] – mammals with only 2 (fore)
limbs [handout]. Manatees have ‘fur’ that forms a superb network of sensory input that allows
them to navigate in murky waters of their habitats [handout]. The follicles of the 3,000 or so
hairs on the animal are each connected to as many as 50 nerves (typical human arm hair =
5). Hairs detect slight pressure changes – explains navigation in dark waters. See the
handout (dugong shown with muzzle flared) and the display in our museum which has a skull
of a Stellar’s sea cow to see how profoundly modified the snouts of these herbivores are –
perfect for rooting out, hoovering up and crushing the sea grasses they live on. The
ancestors of these animals may have given rise to elephants, as the anatomy of elephants is
in line with an animal that lives under-water (so elephants probably represent a mammal that
evolved into an aquatic form, the retraced its steps to rejoin dry land!).

The fur of most mammals provides insulation and protection but one other group of marine
mammals – the cetaceans – have almost abandoned this defining characteristic of mammals.
They have a few hairs on their anterior but are otherwise protected by a thick layer of
blubber. Some have also abandoned teeth – the baleen whales, such as the Blue Whale –
largest animals ever to have lived, feeds on the tiniest of prey using comb like plates of whale
bone suspended from upper jaw [41.6, handout and movie]. The whale lunges into swarms
of krill (small crustaceans) with its mouth open and fills an expandable oral pouch with water,
then closes its mouth and contracts the pouch – this forces the water out, food (eg krill –
crustaceans) trapped by baleen.

All whales have also “abandoned” four legs. Only recently have we understood how they
evolved – from tetrapod ancestors about 48 million years ago, then diversifying with
enormous success [handout; and if interested in evolution, read Scientific American, May
2002, 52-61]. Evolution “quickly” generated streamlined animals with no posterior limbs and
with anterior limbs modified into flippers. One of the drivers for this process was transport
cost [handout]. It ‘costs’ less energy to swim, than to fly or run. Evolution generated toothed
and baleen whales, forming keystone species all over the planet. If you add physiological
and neurological refinements, you get some of the world’s most effective predators e.g. killer
whales. See. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3xmqbNsRSk and
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Killer_whale#p00l4jrz and also
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00l70jv

All present day cetaceans are characterised by a streamlined, “fishy” (spindle) shape [40.2],
water is 1,000x denser than air, so impedes a swimmer far more than a runner or flier (e.g
penguins; fish; aquatic mammals such as dolphins - handout).

Cetaceans are also highly intelligent (see opening sequence and killer whale links above),
many use tools (e.g. dolphins carrying sponges to protect their snouts when foraging in
sand/mud) and some display complex behaviours including provision of “gifts” to attract a
mate – see handout: New Sci 6th December 2007 “Dolphins wave weed to attract a mate”
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/mg19626332.800-dolphins-wave-weed-to-attract-a-mate.html

Marine mammals have “recently” come to play enormously important roles in the marine
ecosystem, and provide a source of huge controversy and debate – so we will finish by briefly
re-examining just one ecosystem where a marine mammal (the sea otter) is a keystone
species [handout]. To understand roles of different elements of any ecosystem, we need
data, although scant, handout provides data on kelp density, urchin and otter numbers over
time in an Alaskan ecosystem that has recently seen killer whales starting to predate otters.
This identifed sea urchins as important grazers. They are the favourite food source of sea
otters – which have a thick layer of under hair (almost impossible to wet) and layer of guard
hair, which is kept scrupulously clean) that when wet, beds down and forms blanket over the
underhair. The animals collect an urchin, secure it in their thick fur and return to the surface
to open the urchin using a rock and feed [movie – again, a non-human mammals that uses
tools] this prevents over-grazing of kelp [handout]. When killer whales are deprived of their
normal diet (seals, or fish – due to man’s interventions) they resort to sea otters and therefore
remove this keystone species. This has had disastrous consequences for the kelp beds in
Alaska. Recent research indicates that a similar story can be told about the keystone role of
sea otters in seagrass beds [handout].

A similar story affected the Macrocystis-based ecosystem of North USA in relation to the fur
trade (early 20th Century) and latterly fishermen who mistakenly believe otters take fish. The
fishermen kill otters, this removes the kelp grazer predator, the kelp vanishes – the fish
vanish! This [movie] is a sad story of an (until recently misunderstood) exceptionally valuable
(both ecologically and economically) ecosystem some of which now enjoys legal protection
(e.g. Monterey Bay, USA – a National Marine Sanctuary) and which will hopefully now be
happy ever after!

BIOL10511Lecture Key learning outcomes Key words

22 Understand the Keystone species
profound modifications Transport cost
that occur on a return to Baleen
the aquatic environment Tool use
Intelligence

Best of luck with the exam!

N.B. Past papers are on the University past papers site and I have loaded 2 on BB and a
Revision Resource (in Course Content), but be aware that I update my lectures every year so
you WILL see questions on topics I haven’t covered - don’t panic! There WILL be questions
on topics I covered for the first time this year. The “tricky” eLearning questions (it was
supposed to be “problem-based” learning!) should have provided you with some of the
knowledge you need for the (more straightforward) exam questions.

Season’s Greetings to all my readers

Liz Sheffield Dec 2013