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The effects of environmental change on Clypeasteroids and adaptive evolutionary history
Summary
This review traces the evolutionary history of clypeasteroid sea urchins from the Cretaceous to the present, discussing how nutritive changes from plankton abundance drove their adaptive radiation and noting that modern clypeasteroids now face new stressors including ocean warming, acidification, and microplastic pollution. The work provides ecological context for understanding how a keystone marine species may respond to contemporary plastic contamination.
Clypeasteroids are irregular echinoids characterized by their flattened skeleton, sophisticated mouth parts and fluffy thorns. Their flat shapes and buried lifestyles are highly adjusted to suspension feeding, thus now ecological niches were discovered. In this paper, the integral evolutionary history from the Cretaceous period to modern times will be introduced and the interrelationship between suspension feeders and plankton will be discussed. It’s worth noting that it was the nutritive environment that contributed to their adaptive evolution by boosting the thriving of plankton. The emergence of Clypeasteroids was ultimately the result of geological evolution in the Mesozoic, especially the Cretaceous period. As the dominant species in modern benthic ecosystems, clypeasteroids are still in the face of a variety of environmental changes, such as ocean warming, ocean acidification and microplastics. It is a brand new perspective to explore the interrelationship between Clypeasteroids and the marine environment by discussing the evolutionary history influenced by plankton like algae and its ecological impact of controlling the population density of algae, and it has been concluded that the marine environmental effects distinguish because Clypeasteroids was born of dramatic environmental change caused by geological activities.