Evolution of Invert Design

How many different ways can you build an animal? Although all animals face the same basic challenges—how to consume, digest, move (or stay put), sense, defend themselves, exchange gases, eliminate wastes, reproduce, and so on—evolution has produced more than 30 distinct body designs that represent different solutions to these challenges. The so-called “invertebrates” (distributed among all animal phyla) include a far greater range of diversity in design than the "vertebrates" (just part of one phylum). My goal is to develop your ability to use the major phyla (and some lower taxa) as examples to illustrate these diverse solutions. Our comparison of body designs will reveal the radically different ways that animals have evolved over the last 600 million years to solve the same problems using different structures and processes.

As a hard-working and engaged participant in this course, you will come to be able to:

• describe how different body designs solve (or create!) biological problems related to physiological and environmental challenges
• contrast major animal groups with regard to how the body works in movement, growth, nutrition, respiration, water balance, excretion, defense, & reproduction
• demonstrate how and why “shared, derived traits” are used to deduce evolutionary relationships
• identify the major characters that are used to deduce relationships among the major animal taxa
• describe large-scale patterns in the history of animal diversity and identify general mechanisms that have led to variation in animal body design
• explain why most animals should really be thought of as a series of radically different life cycle stages that experience different environments and selection pressures during their ontogeny
• describe animals in the context of communities, ecological interactions, and conservation problems
• explain and use terms and taxonomic names that reflect your understanding of major concepts in animal form, function, and phylogeny