IS #45 RELATED TO CTENOPHORES OR PORIFERANS?

Never look back unless you are planning to go there. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I’ve returned from another delightful, multi-state road-trip adventure through the Pacific Northwest seeing family and friends. It was downright refreshing to take many steps away from the on-going tribulations connected with all things political, especially our vulgarian-in-chief and our upcoming presidential election. I recommend hiking through forests and slopes and viewing gorgeous countryside gurgling with snow-melt fed, rushing brooks.

The myopic media-industrial complex makes it seem like we’ll be voting the day after tomorrow, thus every candidate’s quotidian words are vitally important; even though election day is a colossal 453 days away. Equally obscuring is the media’s 24/7 obsession with each uttered and Twittered syllable of #45. This only magnifies his coarseness, crudeness and deceit – and strokes his already over-colossal ego. Please stop, right now.

At the same time, obdurate progressive Dems keep acting as puritanical, self-righteous bluenoses and continue posing as the sole purveyors of certain Democratic victory, while trashing President Obama’s significant accomplishments. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

But I digress.  

Instead, I offer here a much longer perspective about life on this fine, though endangered planet that transcends far beyond the mere 243 years since the USofA was founded.

It seems naturalists have narrowed down the source of the very beginnings of our hoary Tree of Life. They have been wrestling – thankfully not at all in the WWE tradition– with identifying what living creatures are the closest, current counterparts to the first-ever multicellular animal that developed in Earth’s oceans well over half a billion years ago. Naturally, evolutionary biologists haven’t all agreed about which creature deserves this accolade; and represents every human’s (perhaps especially #45) very oldest ancestor. There are two (2) quite distinct animals fighting it out, as it were, in the biologists’ ring.

First, are the beautiful and seemingly fragile Ctenophores, also called comb jellies. As pictured below, they are usually soft, iridescent blobs wreathed by feathery cilia that are sometimes arranged in groups (“combs”). They inhabit many marine habitats around the world. Despite their seeming simplicity, they have central nervous systems, cilia/tentacles to capture prey, and mouths, throats and stomachs to digest their food. Virtually all ctenophores are predators. They can capture and eat krill, shrimp-like crustaceans and even each other. Adult ctenophores range from an inch to almost 5ft in size. Watching comb jellies swim around in the tanks at the Monterey Bay Aquarium is a delightful almost magical experience.

Comb jellies in action.

Second, the other existing animal-type that’s in the running for being most similar to the founder of Earth’s animal kingdom are Poriferans, aka sponges. Sponges come in all sizes, shapes and colors. They are stunning aquatic animals that mostly attach themselves to an underwater surface, often coral reefs, and remain fixed in place, as shown below. The great majority of sponges are marine salt-water species, living in all the oceans. Their habitat ranges from tidal zones to depths exceeding five (5) miles. Their bodies are full of pores and channels allowing water to circulate through them. Virtually all types of sponges are only able to passively eat tiny particles, like bacteria and other microscopic food from the water that passes through their skeletons. They have no nervous system but do have cells in their outer layers can move inwards and change functions. From afar, sort of like stem cells.

Sponges in inaction.

Over several decades evolutionary biologists and morphologists have sort of drawn a line in the sand (on an ocean beach) with regard to the founder of our animal Tree of Life. Some believe comb jellies should hold the crown; other scientists consider sponges to be the closest modern analogue to the first multicellular animal.

For many years, the common scientific wisdom was that sponges were the foundational animal. Then about a decade ago a study using genetic methods argued that comb jellies were the sister group (the closest relatives of another evolutionary branch) of Earth’s first animals. The comb jelly proponents were overjoyed. If they had them, their cilia were wildly fluttering; but it wasn’t to persist. Last week a new study was published that turns the tide and provides “very strong support” for the sponges-first hypothesis. 

It was a tough choice, but my vote goes for #45 having a spongier forbearer. Like them, he’s immovable despite factual reality and has no nervous system. In any case, we must make sure to send him back to the depths from whence he came in 453 days.