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Evolutionary trade-off in reproduction of Cambrian arthropods.

ABSTRACT: Trade-offs play a crucial role in the evolution of life-history strategies of extant organisms by shaping traits such as growth pattern, reproductive investment, and lifespan. One important trade-off is between offspring number and energy (nutrition, parental care, etc.) allocated to individual offspring. Exceptional Cambrian fossils allowed us to trace the earliest evidence of trade-offs in arthropod reproduction. †Chuandianella ovata, from the early Cambrian Chengjiang biota of China, brooded numerous (?100 per clutch), small (Ø, ~0.5 mm) eggs under carapace flaps. The closely related †Waptia fieldensis, from the middle Cambrian Burgess Shale of Canada, also brooded young, but carried fewer (? 26 per clutch), larger (Ø, ~2.0 mm) eggs. The notable differences in clutch/egg sizes between these two species suggest an evolutionary trade-off between quantity and quality of offspring. The shift toward fewer, larger eggs might be an adaptive response to marine ecosystem changes through the early-middle Cambrian. We hypothesize that reproductive trade-offs might have facilitated the evolutionary success of early arthropods.

SUBMITTER: Ou Q

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7190318 | biostudies-literature | 2020 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Evolutionary trade-off in reproduction of Cambrian arthropods.

Ou Qiang Q Vannier Jean J Yang Xianfeng X Chen Ailin A Mai Huijuan H Shu Degan D Han Jian J Fu Dongjing D Wang Rong R Mayer Georg G

Science advances 20200429 18

Trade-offs play a crucial role in the evolution of life-history strategies of extant organisms by shaping traits such as growth pattern, reproductive investment, and lifespan. One important trade-off is between offspring number and energy (nutrition, parental care, etc.) allocated to individual offspring. Exceptional Cambrian fossils allowed us to trace the earliest evidence of trade-offs in arthropod reproduction. †<i>Chuandianella ovata</i>, from the early Cambrian Chengjiang biota of China, b ...[more]

PMID: 32426476

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Project description:BackgroundClassical cadherins are a metazoan-specific family of homophilic cell-cell adhesion molecules that regulate morphogenesis. Type I and type IV cadherins in this family function at adherens junctions in the major epithelial tissues of vertebrates and insects, respectively, but they have distinct, relatively simple domain organizations that are thought to have evolved by independent reductive changes from an ancestral type III cadherin, which is larger than derived paralogs and has a complicated domain organization. Although both type III and type IV cadherins have been identified in hexapods and branchiopods, the process by which the type IV cadherin evolved is still largely unclear.ResultsThrough an analysis of arthropod genome sequences, we found that the only classical cadherin encoded in chelicerate genomes was the type III cadherin and that the two type III cadherin genes found in the spider Parasteatoda tepidariorum genome exhibited a complex yet ancestral exon-intron organization in arthropods. Genomic and transcriptomic data from branchiopod, copepod, isopod, amphipod, and decapod crustaceans led us to redefine the type IV cadherin category, which we separated into type IVa and type IVb, which displayed a similar domain organization, except type IVb cadherins have a larger number of extracellular cadherin (EC) domains than do type IVa cadherins (nine versus seven). We also showed that type IVa cadherin genes occurred in the hexapod, branchiopod, and copepod genomes whereas only type IVb cadherin genes were present in malacostracans. Furthermore, comparative characterization of the type IVb cadherins suggested that the presence of two extra EC domains in their N-terminal regions represented primitive characteristics. In addition, we identified an evolutionary loss of two highly conserved cysteine residues among the type IVa cadherins of insects.ConclusionsWe provide a genomic perspective of the evolution of classical cadherins among bilaterians, with a focus on the Arthropoda, and suggest that following the divergence of early arthropods, the precursor of the insect type IV cadherin evolved through stepwise reductive changes from the ancestral type III state. In addition, the complementary distributions of polarized genomic characters related to type IVa/IVb cadherins may have implications for our interpretations of pancrustacean phylogeny.

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Evolutionary trade-off in reproduction of Cambrian arthropods.

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Evolutionary trade-off in reproduction of Cambrian arthropods.

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