ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
The evolution of siphonophore tentilla for specialized prey capture in the open ocean.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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17 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Portuguese man-of-war genome reveals the genetic basis of medusa loss and sea-air interface adaptation.National science review · 2026Article
- Extreme conservation of cnidarian stinging cell identity despite 600 million years of evolution.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- That Stinging Sensation: Modularity and the Origin of the Stinging Cell.Integrative and comparative biology · 2025Review
- Population genomics of a sailing siphonophore reveals genetic structure in the open ocean.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Zooid arrangement and colony growth in Porpita porpita.Frontiers in zoology · 2025Article
- Independent transitions to fully planktonic life cycles shaped the global distribution of medusozoans in the epipelagic zone.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The complex structure of aquatic food webs emerges from a few assembly rules.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Physalia gonodendra are not yet sexually mature when released.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Giants among Cnidaria: Large Nuclear Genomes and Rearranged Mitochondrial Genomes in Siphonophores.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- phytools 2.0: an updated R ecosystem for phylogenetic comparative methods (and other things).PeerJ · 2024Article
- Biotic assemblages of gelatinous zooplankton in the Gulf of Mexico and adjacent waters: An evolutionary biogeographic approach.PloS one · 2024Article
- Characterizing the secret diets of siphonophores (Cnidaria: Hydrozoa) using DNA metabarcoding.PloS one · 2022Article
- A simple hierarchical model for heterogeneity in the evolutionary correlation on a phylogenetic tree.PeerJ · 2022Article
- The influence of ecological factors on cnidarian venoms.Toxicon: X · 2021Review
- The evolution of siphonophore tentilla for specialized prey capture in the open ocean.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- The Evolutionary History of Siphonophore Tentilla: Novelties, Convergence, and Integration.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2021Article
- Characterising Functional Venom Profiles of Anthozoans and Medusozoans within Their Ecological Context.Marine drugs · 2020Review
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Predator specialization has often been considered an evolutionary "dead end" due to the constraints associated with the evolution of morphological and functional optimizations throughout the organism. However, in some predators, these changes are localized in separate structures dedicated to prey capture. One of the most extreme cases of this modularity can be observed in siphonophores, a clade of pelagic colonial cnidarians that use tentilla (tentacle side branches armed with nematocysts) exclusively for prey capture. Here we study how siphonophore specialists and generalists evolve, and what morphological changes are associated with these transitions. To answer these questions, we: a) Measured 29 morphological characters of tentacles from 45 siphonophore species, b) mapped these data to a phylogenetic tree, and c) analyzed the evolutionary associations between morphological characters and prey-type data from the literature. Instead of a dead end, we found that siphonophore specialists can evolve into generalists, and that specialists on one prey type have directly evolved into specialists on other prey types. Our results show that siphonophore tentillum morphology has strong evolutionary associations with prey type, and suggest that shifts between prey types are linked to shifts in the morphology, mode of evolution, and evolutionary correlations of tentilla and their nematocysts. The evolutionary history of siphonophore specialization helps build a broader perspective on predatory niche diversification via morphological innovation and evolution. These findings contribute to understanding how specialization and morphological evolution have shaped present-day food webs.
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