Another Australian first: sex?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 24 March 2008 21:27

Science - Biology

UCR’s report notes that Droser and Gehling believe that “the clusters of similarly sized individuals of Funisia are strongly suggestive of “spats,” huge numbers of offspring an organism gives birth to at once. Besides producing spats, the individual tubular organisms reproduced by budding, and grew by adding bits to their tips.”

Droser said that: “Among living organisms, spat production results almost always from sexual reproduction and only very rarely from asexual reproduction.”

Rachel Wood, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, who was not involved in the research, said the finding shows that fundamental ecological strategies were already established in the earliest known animal communities, some 570 million years ago.

Wood noted that: “The fact that Funisia shows close-packed growth on the sea floor allows us to infer that this organism also reproduced sexually, producing a limited number of larval spatfalls.”

Wood continued: “This is how many primitive animals, such as sponges and corals, reproduce and grow today. So although we do not know the affinities of many of these oldest animals, we do know that their communities were structured in very similar ways to those that exist today.”

UCR’s report says that scientists believe a clear picture of the early ecosystem on our planet can inform us how early life evolved, what it looked like, and how organisms respond to environmental and other changes.

Droser noted that: “The nature of the early ecosystem also clues us on what to look for on other planets in our search for extraterrestrial life.”

As such, it’s interesting to note that NASA provided support for the research, which was otherwise largely funded by the US National Science Foundation.