July 26, 2019 Friday
Bedtime Story
Soft-Bodied Organisms Have Little Hope of Leaving Behind Fossil Records
You can very well summarize from the last
night’s story that the process of fossilization is highly skewed towards
organisms with hard-parts.
This leaves nearly entire groups of
soft-bodied organisms with little chance of getting geologically and
paleontologically documented as fossils.
One must not under-estimate the biological
importance and weightage the soft-bodied animals carry with them (and they do
so quite literally).
In terms of the animal biomass currently
living on planet Earth the soft-bodied animals overwhelmingly outweigh the
hard-bodied ones with their net weight being at least double and possibly more
than those of hard-bodied ones.
The chief reason for this being the sheer
magnitude of round worms or the nematodes that are thriving on planet earth
(Caenorhabditis elegans – the model organism is also a nematode).
They have adapted themselves to each and
every ecosystem found on this planet including the floor of the ocean where
they represent 90% of its population.
Nematodes today occupy complete and total
numerical dominance of planet Earth with its population density often exceeding
a million individuals per square meter and comprising 80% of all individual
animals on earth.
A subset of roundworms along with tapeworms
and flukes together form a special group of macroscopic parasitic organisms
known as helminths.
The term “helminth” is in a way artificial
as there is no consensus on their taxonomy nor have they any special
evolutionary link between them.
What joins them together is their medical
significance to the species of human apes as of the 1 million estimated species
of helminth around 300,000 are known to parasite vertebrates (many of them feed
us and toil relentlessly for us) out of which at least 300 infect humans alone.
Helminthiasis has been labeled as one among
the several neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) which again is a relative term.
NTDs have been getting lesser attention and
therefore sparser funding for research, distribution and treatment in
comparison to the big three infectious diseases namely HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis
and malaria.
Nathan Cobb of Baltimore, Maryland who is
known as “the father of nematology in the United States” has this to say about
the nematodes or the round worms:
“In short, if all the matter in the
universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly
recognizable, and if, as disembodies spirits, we could then investigate it, we
should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented
by a film of nematodes.
The location of towns would be
decipherable, since for every massing of human beings there would be a
corresponding massing of certain nematodes.
Trees would still stand in ghostly rows
representing our streets and highways…”
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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