No Responses to “Unrelated Species Filling Similar Niches Sometimes Resemble One Another Because Of A Process Called?”

1. Caitie says:

   April 11, 2012 at 12:59 pm

   I have your back!
   This is called convergent evolution. I’ll give you a good example of this:
   The horseshoe crab got its name because it lives in the sea, and it has a hard carapace like other crustaceans. In short, it looks like a crab, and was put into the crustacean family for many years.
   However, in doing tests on the blood of the horseshoe crab to study clotting mechanisms, scientists discovered that biochemically, the blood of the horseshoe crab was like that of arachnids (spiders, scorpions, ticks) and not at all like crustaceans.
   While the name stayed the same..they are still called horseshoe crabs..they had to be reclassified into the arachnid family, because that’s what they are.
   Living in a marine environment meant that these cousins of spiders developed gills and the large, hard carapace which protects larger marine animals from predators and water pressure, but if you look at a photo of a horseshoe crab, you’ll see that it has 8 legs just like other arachnids.
   The development of the marine characteristics is a great example of convergent evolution; two totally different species, the crustaceans (lobsters, crabs) and an arachnid share a common environment, so they developed similar outer structures. The revelation came with studying the biochemistry, which is a better indicator of species identity.

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