Discuss Convergence In Animals Providing Examples From Both Arthropods And Vertebrates

Discuss convergence in animals, providing examples from both arthropods and vertebrates. (discussing convergence in the phylum arthropods with examples from within this phylum and likewise for the vertebrates.)

Convergent evolution is the process in which organisms which are not closely related derive akin traits separately due to the need for adaptation to similar environments or ecological niches. There may be resemblances at a phylogenetic level, but the basic DNA sequences are different.

Morphologically, convergent evolution occurs when different species live in similar environments and hence adapt to the same environmental factors, such as challenges to reproduction and survival. Convergent evolution can also happen due to random mutation.

As in vertebrate higher brain centers, the insect mushroom bodies function in associative, context dependent and spatial learning and memory, and in sensory integration. In both vertebrates and insects, reliance upon these behaviors and associated enlargement of the relevant brain centers might be encountered in the context of food acquisition. Examples in vertebrates include large hippocampi in food-caching parid birds that must remember the locations of their hidden food stores, and larger total brain sizes in birds that display flexible and innovative food acquisition behaviors. It has been noted in mammals that as brains and brain regions increase in size, they become increasingly subcompartmentalized. One potential explanation for this evolutionary trend is that as neuron number increases in large brains, it becomes prohibitively expensive energetically to build and maintain connections among them all. Networks therefore evolve to minimize long-distance connections while maintaining local circuits, the latter of which may diverge into distinct functional subcompartments. These subcompartments might act as parallel processing units for different aspects of a single computational task, as observed in the 30+ functional subdivisions of the macaque visual cortex or acquire entirely new functions, such as the specialization of Broca’s area of the cortex for language processing in