To continue with the "tradition" started by the Spiders thread 
I wanted to title this thread "ctenophores" or "comb jellies" or something equivalent, but I figured that most people here (myself included) probably don't know enough about ctenophores to devote a whole thread to them like we did with spiders and cephalopods.
So, this is the thread for all of our favourite neglected invertebrates.
My cool invertebrates of the day are, as you may have guessed, ctenophores or comb jellies, which have nothing to do with jellyfish. (See here and here for much better introductions than I could give)
Ctenophores are relatively poorly studied*, which is a real shame given that they may be one of the most interesting groups of animals with regards to animal phylogeny and evolution. They may be the earliest branching animal phylum, which would mean either that sponges (traditionally considered the most primitive animals) are secondarily simplified, or that ctenophores evolved their complex bodies independently of other animals.
(Although the phylogenetic position of ctenophores is really, really not settled AFAIK. These guys desperately need more love. A genome sequencing project would be awesome.
A woman can dream...)
Plus, they are also pretty (picture of Mnemiopsis below from tolweb. More ctenophore diversity in pictures here).
*As of today, 2 pm GMT, [ctenophora OR ctenophore] gives me slightly over 8000 hits in Google Scholar. That is less than a third of the hits (~23k) for [cnidaria OR cnidarian], about 1/19 of the hits for the equivalent search term for arthropods (157k) and only about 1/80 as many as for vertebrates (672k). These are probably underestimates, as I think better-studied groups are less often referred to by the names of such high-level groupings, unless the paper is somehow about vertebrates or arthropods as a whole.
I wanted to title this thread "ctenophores" or "comb jellies" or something equivalent, but I figured that most people here (myself included) probably don't know enough about ctenophores to devote a whole thread to them like we did with spiders and cephalopods.
So, this is the thread for all of our favourite neglected invertebrates.
My cool invertebrates of the day are, as you may have guessed, ctenophores or comb jellies, which have nothing to do with jellyfish. (See here and here for much better introductions than I could give
)Ctenophores are relatively poorly studied*, which is a real shame given that they may be one of the most interesting groups of animals with regards to animal phylogeny and evolution. They may be the earliest branching animal phylum, which would mean either that sponges (traditionally considered the most primitive animals) are secondarily simplified, or that ctenophores evolved their complex bodies independently of other animals.
(Although the phylogenetic position of ctenophores is really, really not settled AFAIK. These guys desperately need more love. A genome sequencing project would be awesome.
A woman can dream...)Plus, they are also pretty (picture of Mnemiopsis below from tolweb. More ctenophore diversity in pictures here).
*As of today, 2 pm GMT, [ctenophora OR ctenophore] gives me slightly over 8000 hits in Google Scholar. That is less than a third of the hits (~23k) for [cnidaria OR cnidarian], about 1/19 of the hits for the equivalent search term for arthropods (157k) and only about 1/80 as many as for vertebrates (672k). These are probably underestimates, as I think better-studied groups are less often referred to by the names of such high-level groupings, unless the paper is somehow about vertebrates or arthropods as a whole.
