Vertebrates Persuasive Essay

1090 Words3 Pages

The background of this article gives information that is necessary to understand the experiment. The shape of the pelvic girdle is an appropriate predictor of both phylogeny and movement in terrestrial vertebrates. However, in marine vertebrates, the gravitational forces typically applied to terrestrial pelvic girdles are not there and therefore have little impact on the shape of the girdle. Pelvic girdles of fish are generally not attached to the vertebrae and primarily are used as a place for muscles to attach and supporting of the fins. The authors discuss how in many cases the pelvic girdle could be removed and not result in any complications. However, there are some marine vertebrates that are capable of bottom walking on the ocean floor with their fins. In batoids, the pelvic fins are used for walking, which is when pelvic fins move in an alternating fashion, or punting, when both pelvic fins move at the same time. There is also augmented punting; this is when the vertebrate uses both the pectoral fins and the pelvic fins to generate more thrust, this action decreases the forces on the pelvic fins during a punt. While this locomotion would …show more content…

They found that their groupings of similar shaped pelvic girdles fell into the correct category, except at the family level.
The results from the experiments supported the hypothesis that the batoid pelvic girdle shape correlated with the type of locomotion. They found that the form of locomotion utilized by the batoid had a greater determining factor on the shape of the pelvic girdle compared to the phylogeny. An important discovery of this experiment showed that the shape of the pelvic girdle of a batoid can be used to predict the swimming and punting mode, and the order to which the vertebrate

More about Vertebrates Persuasive Essay

Open Document