Biological traps

[Nic Tamzek]

I have created an EvoWiki page on Biological Traps as a rebuttal to Behe's mousetrap analogy. I encourage people to add examples, pictures, background or body links/material, whatever.

http://www.evowiki.org/wiki.phtml?title=Biological_traps

I recall some threads on anglerfish and carnivorous plants here in II from long ago, but I can't seem to find them...anyone still have the links?

[Jabu Khan]

Is it just me or are more and more biology databases becoming subscription only and just about every search for something related to evolutionary theory is overrun with fundie crap.

Anyways I was wondering some frogs have markings on their tongues that they use to bait insects, are there any diplocaulid or labyrinthodont fossils with evidence of some sort of angler appendage?

[lpetrich]

You may want to use jargon words in your searches; though the professional jargon can look formdiable, creationists often do not care much for it.

Also, you do not need a subscription to look in some databases of abstracts; check out the likes of
http://www.pubmed.org -- biomedical, molecular biology
http://highwire.stanford.edu -- more general

I think that the real problem is that such sites are often not well suited to being indexed by search engines, because their pages are composed dynamically from database contents, instead of being static, as is typical for many personal websites.

To clarify, their pages often consist of not only the "bare" contents, but lots of navigation buttons and other links -- all added by some webserver add-on modules.

[God Fearing Atheist]

On the whole online paper matter, i started a page on the EvoWiki to collect free, relevant stuff. If you have, or know of, free online papers somehow related to evolution and/or creationism, please add them here (http://www.evowiki.org/wiki.phtml?title=Online_peer-reviewed_journal_articles).

[variant 13]

Originally posted by lpetrich

http://www.pubmed.org -- biomedical, molecular biology
http://highwire.stanford.edu -- more general
.

Your a star lpetrich, though how I could forget pubmed is anyones guess.

[Nic Tamzek]

Angler fish thread: http://www.iidb.org/vbb/archive/index.php/t-38826.html

...I am reposting here, because the old thread seems to have lost the formatting:

Regarding the anglerfish, I can remember that there is a Stephen J. Gould essay somewhere about it -- IIRC there is in fact a family of related fish species with spines, some of which look mildly lure-ish, some of which look *very* lure-ish.

E.g.:

http://www.ultranet.com/~jkimball/BiologyPages/A/anglerfish100.jpg

This is from Kimball's Biology Pages (http://www.ultranet.com/~jkimball/BiologyPages/W/Welcome.html) which are great by the way. He writes,

The angler fish (<i>Antennarius</i>) displays a lure resembling a small fish. The lure is a development of the spine of the first dorsal fin. This species of anglerfish, which was found in the Philippines, is 9.5 cm long. Note its use of camouflage: its texture (and color) closely resemble the sponge- and algae-encrusted rocks found in its habitat.

I had to dig through several pages of my search engine spitting up creationist drivel on the angler fish before finding just this little worthwhile bit. It looks like to find out much more one would have to visit a library...hang on...oh, cool, persistence pays off, check this out:

The Angler Fish (http://www.geocities.com/thesciencefiles/angler/fish.html)

You can see how this kind of adaptation could get started when you look at a species like this, which has lots of spines that aren't lures, and one that is a lure but not a particularly fantastic one:

http://www.geocities.com/thesciencefiles/angler/pic1.JPG

From there they can lose the rest of the spines...

http://www.geocities.com/thesciencefiles/angler/pic2.JPG

...and a heck of a lot uglier, this thing looks like it's from a horror movie...

http://www.geocities.com/thesciencefiles/angler/pic3withmale.JPG

(note also another interesting feature of anglerfish, the fact that the male is tiny and mates by biting the female and eventually getting permanently attached as a kind of parasitic little sperm bank for the female...yet another example of the common biological trend of "being a male sucks", another thing that evolution explains nicely but where design is left hapless)

Later, nic

[Nic Tamzek]

Finally found the Gould essay I was thinking of:

Gould, S. J. (1980). "The Panda's Thumb (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393013804/)" W.W. Norton & Company Ltd; 1st ed., pp. 35-44. Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393013804)

Anglerfish lure their dinner, rather than a free ride for their larvae [as in the lures of the clam Lampsilis]. They carry a highly modified dorsal fin spine affixed to the tips of their snouts. At the end of this spine, they mount an appropriate lure. Some deep-sea species, living in a dark world untouched by light from the surface, fish with their own source of illumination: they gather phosphorescent bacteria in their lures. Shallow-water species tend to have colorful, bumpy bodies, and look remarkably like rocks encrusted with sponges and algae. They rest inert on the bottom and wave or wiggle their conspicuous lures near their mouths. "Baits" differ among species, but most resemble -- often imperfectly -- a variety of invertebrates, including worms and crustaceans.

Pietsch and Grobecker's anglerfish, however, has evolved a fish lure every bit as impressive as the decoy mounted on Lampsilisp's rear -- a first for anglerfish. (Their report bears as its appropriate title, "The Compleat Angler" and cites as an epigraph the passage from Walton quoted above.) This exquisite fake also sports eyelike spots of pigment in the right place. In addition, it bears compressed filaments representing pectoral and pelvic fins along the bottom of the body, extensions from the back resembling dorsal and anal fins, and even an expanded rear projection looking for all the world like a tail. Pietsch and Grobecker conclude: "The bait is nearly an exact replica of a small fish that could easily belong to any of a number of percoid families common to the Philippine region." The angler even ripples its bait through the water, "simulating the laterial undulations of a swimming fish."

[...]

The only thing more difficult to explain than perfection is repeated perfection by very different animals. A fish on a clam's rear end and another in front of an anglerfish's nose -- the first evolved from a brood pouch and outer skin, the second from a fish spine -- more than doubles the trouble. I have no difficulty defending the origin of both "fishes" by evolution. A plausible series of intermediate stages can be identified for Lampsilis. The fact that anglerfish press a fin spine into service as a lure reflects the jury-rigged, parts-available principle that made the panda's thumb and the orchid's labellum speak so strongly for evolution (see the first essay of this trilogy). But Darwinians must do more than demonstrate evolution; they must defence the basic mechanism of random variation and natural selection as the primary cause of evolutionary change. (Gould 1980, pp. 35-37)