#rapid evolution

[blackbirdmuse]

Him chonky. Him antlers much wow. Him evolve multi cellular eyes; so much vision. Very zooplankton, much water flea.

[ranger-rai]

What are your opinions on rapid evolution? Like say when a trainer feeds their pokemon candies to help them evolve instantly rather than gradually? Are there any adverse effects on the pokemon themselves? I'd assume it's just like forcing someone to instantly grow up rather than living out a childhood, right?

This is a pretty complex question, so let me start by giving the simple answer first:

It's a very bad practice and should be regulated a lot closer.

When it comes to pokemon growth, evolution and health you need to consider that they need time to grow into their final stages, and the time could be years spent with their trainer, allowing their body to strengthen and develop naturally.

Feeding a pokemon a bunch of "Rare Candy" artificially stimulates the natural energy pokemon output to conduct evolution.

Unfortunately, these "candies" are pretty easy to get your hands on and aren't seriously regulated because they actually have medical uses.

(You can also look up how to make them online as well)

These candies can be used if a pokemon us having some developmental problems in their evolution cycle, perhaps early evolution symptoms and signs but there's some kind of delay or energy imbalance, the candies can help stimulate this process to help them grow and evolve naturally.

Unfortunately these candies being medically useful, over the counter accessible and treatments for pretty simple issues have made them easy to get and easier to abuse, Unfortunately resulting in some pretty common problems for both trainers and pokemon.

While the benefit of the pokemon reaching its "maximum potential" way faster, some of the most common drawbacks of "Rapid Evolution" or "Candy Evo" are health defects like joint issues, breathing problems, heart and organ size difference, and under developed muscles and misplaced power output.

However, I am a huge advocate against raising training for the biggest drawback:

Delayed Mental Growth.

Unfortunately, a pokemon might evolve too quickly, and as a result, they are essentially a small pokemon in a large pokemons body, and its a lot more difficult to manage than you'd expect.

Personality disparity, random bouts or depression and fits of anger, and trying to find a way to explain to your pokemon that they can't fit in your lap or the small bed for them and now they need to sleep outside or in a less comfortable place.

It's all a lot that weighs on a person's mind and heart.

When I found Sylvester, he was alone, scared, and confused from his Rapid Evolution situation, after a child was gifted an Aron and used a ton of rare candies to help it evolve.

Apparently, she didn't know it would evolve into a large and heavy pokekon, and he wasn't as "cute," as she thought, so she abandoned him in Mt. Coronet.

This is also why I'm absolutely for education and NOT giving children Pokémon before they are trained and do some kind of camp beforehand.

Thankfully Sylvester has done so well in his over a year with me, and he is understanding his role and current situation in life, and has really become a joyful and loving ball of happiness who loves to dress fancy and serve people drinks st my Cafe.

He's always such a big help and a successful story of rehabilitation and coming together to turn a really bad situation into a loving family.

So please do not try and do a Rapid Evolution and discourage anyone you might hear talking about doing it. It really has a large chance not to end well.

[carnegiemuseumnaturalhistory]

Extremely Rapid Evolution of Cone Snail Toxins

By Tim Pearce

Cone snails live in the sea and inject venom to paralyze their prey. Most cone snails eat worms, some eat other snails, and some catch and eat fish. They use a hypodermic dart (a modified radular tooth) to inject venom. The venom contains about 100 different peptides (short proteins) that act as neurotoxins. Each of the 600 or so species of cone snail has its own unique cocktail of peptides, with very little overlap of peptides among species, yielding >50,000 peptides among the cone snails of the world.

Cone snail venom peptides are among the most rapidly evolving protein-coding genes in animals. They evolve twice as fast as most other known proteins. The rapid evolution appears to result from extensive gene duplications that provide abundant opportunities for natural selection during predator-prey interactions [1,2].

Furthermore, cone venom peptides are one of the most highly post-translationally modified classes of gene products known. That means the peptides undergo extensive modifications after being translated from DNA, including bromination, glycosylation, and amino acid epimerization (changing from L to D, like becoming their own mirror image) [3].

The venom cocktail targets particular kinds of prey; worm-eaters have a different suite of peptides than fish eaters. At different stages of development, they can express different genes. When very young, the fish eaters are too small to eat fish, so they eat worms, then switch to fish later. Their venom cocktail changes from worm toxins to fish toxins when they switch prey.

Textile cone (Conus textile), a sea snail with venom powerful enough to kill humans. Specimen CM 127704, photo by Tim Pearce.

Conus magus is one of the species whose diet shifts from worms to fish as it grows. In these diet-shifting species, the shape of the radular dart changes as well – those eating worms have unbarbed darts, while those eating fish have backward pointing barbs to help keep hold of the fish [2,4,5].

Animal nerve cells contain many kinds of ion channels, whose function aids in transmitting signals along the nerve. Each cone snail peptide can target a particular kind of ion channel. The complex mixture of peptides in cone snail venom blocks many ion channels and neuron receptors in prey species. Surprisingly, many cone snail peptides act on pain targets, but it is not clear what advantage the snail would derive from numbing the prey’s pain. However, pain-killing properties are one of the reasons that cone snail venoms are of great interest to pharmaceutical companies and at least one cone snail peptide is currently used as a pain-killer in humans.

Researchers can prospect for venom peptides in the DNA of cone snail tissue snips or from museum specimens. By prospecting in DNA, they can find genes for venom peptides that are not being expressed at that particular life stage [6]. Once a useful peptide is discovered and characterized, it can be manufactured (so it doesn’t need to be milked from the snail).

Cone snails can switch rapidly between toxins for predation or toxins for defense. The toxins used by the geography cone, Conus geographus for catching prey are mostly inactive on humans, but the toxins it uses for defense are paralytic peptides that block neuromuscular receptors. Conus geographus and Conus textile are the two cone snail species known to kill humans [7].

To see videos of cone snails catching and swallowing fish, type into your internet browser: “cone snail eating.”

In addition to their beauty and amazing prey capture abilities, cone snails are remarkable for the extremely rapid evolution of their toxins, some of which show promise as useful medicines.

Timothy A. Pearce, PhD, is the head of the mollusks section at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

Notes:

[1] Duda, T.F. & Palumbi, S.R. 1999. Molecular genetics of ecological diversification: Duplication and rapid evolution of toxin genes of the venomous gastropod Conus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A., 96(12): 6820–6823.

[2] Chang, D.& Duda, T.F., Jr. 2016. Age-related association of venom gene expression and diet of predatory gastropods. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 16: 27.

[3] Buczek, O., Yoshikami, D., Bulaj, G., Jimenez, E.C. & Olivera, B.M. 2005. Posttranslational amino acid isomerization: a functionally important D-amino acid in an excitatory peptide. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 280: 4247-4253.

[4] Nybakken, J. & Perron, F. 1988. Ontogenetic change in the radula of Conus magus(Gastropoda). Marine Biology, 98(2): 239–242

[5] Nybakken, J. 1990. Ontogenetic change in the Conusradula, its form, distribution among the radula types, and significance in systematics and ecology. Malacologia, 32(1): 35-54.

[6] I suspect that post-translational effects (including introns and exons) would obscure the understanding of the final product of a peptide discovered by DNA prospecting.

[7]Dutertre, S., Jin, A.-H., Vetter, I., Hamilton, B., Sunagar, K., Lavergne, V., Dutertre, V., Fry, B.G., Antunes, A., Venter, D.J., Alewood, P.F. & Lewis, R.J. 2014. Evolution of separate predation- and defence-evoked venoms in carnivorous cone snails. Nature Communications, 5(3521): 1-9.

[naturalsciencesbelgium]

Researchers of our Institute discovered that organisms can evolve surprisingly quickly by re-using ancient gene variants that were once useful. Understanding how species manage to adapt quickly is important in times of sudden changes in climate and environment.

A plant or animal usually evolves very slowly. You need new gene variants, and these can only arise through rare mutations in the DNA. Yet, biologists see that some populations are adapting very quickly to a new environment. This is the case, for example, with the saltmarsh beetle (Pogonus chalceus): individuals with long wings, who live in a swamp that is flooded once a year, evolve in barely twenty generations - in this case also twenty years - to a smaller short-winged type when they colonise a swamp that gets flooded daily.

Ice age

Researchers of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences wanted to unravel the mechanism behind this remarkable observation and screened the entire genome of several populations of saltmarsh beetles. They were able to identify the genes underlying the rapid evolution towards the short-wing type. These genes turned out to be anything but new: by examining the variation in these genes, they saw that the gene variants for shorter wings originated some 200,000 years ago, during the second last ice age. At that time, an isolated population must have adapted over a long period to the tidal marsh in which they lived. They became smaller and developed shorter wings.

Sleeping genes

When the climate became warmer again, the short-winged saltmarsh beetles mixed with a long-winged population. As a result, the gene variants for short wings ended up in the gene pool of the long-wings. If these individuals now colonise tidal marshes again, they will carry all the necessary gene variants for shorter wings, so natural selection can very quickly produce a short-winged type. The ancient genes are in a sense reused.

This way, evolution can take place several times in almost identical ways, in different periods and in areas that are far apart. Unravelling the mechanism behind rapid evolution is important: it can help us to understand to what extent populations can adapt to climate change and habitat loss today. Some organisms can clearly do this very quickly. But the researchers stress that this is probably only the case if populations of that species have adapted to identical conditions over a long period of time in the distant past, and if the old gene variants that have arisen as a result are still present in the gene pool.

Toolbox

‘Everything that lives inherits a large toolbox from generation to generation', says evolutionary biologist Frederik Hendrickx (RBINS). ‘It contains many old tools that have proven their worth in a certain period and time but are no longer used today. But those old chisels and screws can suddenly prove useful again, even vital.’ Humans are no exception: 'We too can still carry ancient gene variants that could one day determine our success in existence'.

The study was published in in PLOS Genetics.

[incrediblebeasties]

Such rapid evolution likely let snakes exploit more ecological gaps than lizards after the cataclysmic mass extinction that occurred 66 million years ago doomed several groups of reptiles, including nonavian dinosaurs. This versatility is still reflected in the diets of snakes today. Most living lizards stick to insects or other small arthropods; snakes are generally much more adventurous and will prey on animals ranging from rodents and birds to kangaroos and crocodilians.

An Evolutionary 'Big Bang' Explains Why Snakes Come in So Many Strange Varieties

Snakes saw a burst of adaptation about 128 million years ago that led to them exploding in diversity and evolving up to three times faster t

[hardnekkig]

Cities are becoming a living lab for species evolution — University Affairs

Scientists have found that urban animals are not just adapting their behaviours, but changing at a genetic level compared to their country cousins.

[hardnekkig]

Disaster taxa squad

[hardnekkig]