McCarthy, M. and McCarthy, L. (2019) The evolution of the urinary bladder as a storage organ: scent trails and selective pressure of the first land animals in a computational simulation. SN Applied Sciences, 1 (12). 1727. ISSN 2523-3963
Abstract
The function of waste control in all living organisms is one of the vital importance. Almost universally, terrestrial tetrapods have a urinary bladder with a storage function. It is well documented that many marine and aerial species do not have an organ of such a function, or have one with very depressed storage functionality. Bladder morphology indicates it has evolved from a thin-walled structure used for osmoregulatory purposes, as it is currently used in many marine animals. It is hypothesised that the storage function of the urinary bladder allows for an evolutionary selective advantage in reducing the likelihood of successful predation. Random walks simulating predator and prey movements with simplified scent trails were utilised to represent various stages of the hunt: Detection and pursuit. A final evolutionary model is proposed in order to display the advantages over inter-generational time scales and illustrates how a bladder may evolve from an osmoregulatory organ to one of the storage. Data sets were generated for each case and analysed indicating the viability of such advantages. From the highly consistent results, three distinct characteristics of having a storage function in the urinary bladder are suggested: reduced scent trail detection rate; increased prey–predator separation (upon scent trail detection); and a reduced probability of successful capture upon scent detection by the predator. Furthered by the evolutionary model indicating such characteristics are conserved and augmented over many generations, it is concluded that prey–predator interactions provide a large selective pressure in the evolution of the urinary bladder and its storage function.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2019. Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
Keywords: | Urinary bladder; Evolutionary biology; Early terrestrial tetrapods; Monté Carlo simulation |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > Department of Physics and Astronomy (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 26 Oct 2020 13:23 |
Last Modified: | 11 Jun 2024 08:51 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Science and Business Media LLC |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s42452-019-1692-9 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:167199 |