A Sea of Glass Page 16

  An examination of the three classes of the chordates is, once again, a shocking stroll through big evolutionary changes in features. The basic body plan of a sea squirt, with a gill basket and notochorded larva, is transformed by evolution in different ways in each of the classes. One class, the sea squirts, has an attached adult with a big gill basket and a small, brief swimming tadpole larva. Another class, called the salps, takes that attached adult and makes it a jet-propelled, transparent gill basket, swimming the open oceans. The final class, the larvaceans, loses the adult form and turns the tadpole larva into a reproducing adult. This process, by which a larval form evolves to become a reproducing adult, is called paedomorphosis. Another example of this, perhaps more familiar, is the life cycle of the axolotl (Mexican salamander or Mexican walking fish), where the adult retains the finned tail and gills of the larva and never metamorphoses into a form like other adult salamanders, with lungs and no tail fin.

  Chordata: the sea squirt Boltenia ovifera, or sea peach, in glass. Photo by Gary Hodges.

  There is irony in the fact that the Blaschkas’ chordate offerings are very thin. This is our group on the tree of life, our closest kin, united with us in a few shared characteristics. Fittingly enough, our linkages with the spineless chordates hearken back to Ernst Haeckel’s controversial theme from 160 years ago: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. In this context, our phylogeny, or relatedness to sea squirts, is most closely revealed in early ontogeny, or when we are both larvae. While there are only a few spineless chordates in our Blaschka collection, the key classes are represented, ready to fit into our tree of life.

  ° ° °

  It would be fun to share with the Blaschkas our brief primer on the spineless tree of life and the never-ending discoveries that stretch from before the 1860s and will continue well past our time. They would be entranced by the discoveries made over the past 160 years about relatedness among the spineless groups. I like to imagine their wonder at the discovery that ctenophores instead of sponges are the oldest invertebrates, that nematodes are most closely related to arthropods via the process of molting, and that most worms are far more closely related to nudibranchs and cephalopods than to crabs and insects. Most of the other facts about animal development and phylogeny are things the Blaschkas knew already and highlighted in their comprehensive collection.

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