Forget carcinization. Limpets are the true convergent evolution queens 👑

Posted by JFCudennec@reddit | marinebiology | View on Reddit | 18 comments

I'm a marine biologist who spent years reading limpet shells for palaeoclimate and archaeological research.

Carcinization gets all the memes, but the independent evolution of the limpet body plan happened in vast number of separate gastropod families, over 500 million years.

I wrote about why it keeps happening, how it fooled taxonomists for decades, and how one lineage even managed to re-coil, challenging Dollo's law.

Happy to discuss!

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Ok_Permission1087@reddit

Is there a list of all the 54 gastropod lineages that have undergone limpetization?

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Sure, it's in this paper : Vermeij, G. J. (2017). The limpet form in gastropods: evolution, distribution, and implications for the comparative study of history. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 120(1), 22-37.

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Ok_Permission1087@reddit

This is really cool!

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JFCudennec@reddit (OP)

🙌

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tgdtgd@reddit

I am looking forward to the next article! It is great how you managed to show the broader picture whole simultaneously provide hyper focus only a PhD can give you on a very niche topic 😊

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JFCudennec@reddit (OP)

Thanks ! I wil probably altern between limpet articles and other more general things that stir my mind. Next week will be about the use of fossils by humans through history, but before academic palaeontology, and how people dealt with these weird objects. The week after I'll come back to limpets ;)

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DMBuce@reddit

This makes limpetization the most repeated convergence of a body plan in the animal kingdom, dominating the leaderboard by an order of magnitude. Only the independent evolution of eyes rivals that number, with forty to sixty-five estimated origins. But eyes are organs, while limpetization reshapes the entire body plan.

Is there somewhere I can look for more info on this "leaderboard" of convergently-evolved features? Like is there a study that looked at this specifically, or are there some things that have convergently evolved so many times that people generally agree that they must be among the most common?

Really quite enjoyed this article (and it’s making me miss studying an adjacent area)! I apologise for focusing on a very minor point that’s only tangentially related to the important bit, but that comment about the carcinisation meme replacing the concept of convergent evolution in a lot of online spaces is something I never realised, but is definitely going to turn out to be useful (for me, at least). I’ve struggled a bit lately with explaining the concept of convergent evolution (and/or how it relates to taxonomy) with a lot of people, but it seems everyone I’ve run into with an online presence is aware of the “everything turns into a crab” meme on some level, and that’s probably a much better way of explaining it to people with an example they already know rather than any of the ones I’ve been using. That, or just sending them this article.

I don’t think I’ve got the cognitive ability to contribute anything of use to the discussion nowadays, but just wanted to say great work!

~~Also, my most important takeaway is that we need SpongeBob to introduce a limpet character who organises raves in their spare time.~~

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JustAnotherBarnacle@reddit

Carcinization is nothing but a meme anyway, it is meaningless in reality