Fantastic video. There's been a strange "backlash" against mammals in Spec Evo that part of me blames on the desire for projects not be be seen as "mundane" while another part of me sees it as a backlash against the older idea of mammals being superior to "less evolved" animals like dinosaurs.
I think another part is that people often overlook smaller animals just because sea birds aren’t marine mega fauna doesn’t mean there not successful given how diverse they are today
I think its the backlash to the idea that mammals are the "most advanced" compared to dinosaurs @@troutinspace5427 all animals that are alive are successful honestly. Life is hard.
@@golira19 iwould more say cause mamals are more or less the group today with the least members ( i could be wronge) but def it would today not the age of mammals but literalyl the age of insects ,,thers like more beetles then everythign else combined
@@Kurominos1 It's been that way since the carboniferous though. That term doesn't refer to which clade is the most populous, it refers to the main group of megafauna dominating a geological era. Hence the "age of dinosaurs" which almost certainly also had more insect biomass especially due to the angiosperm revolution of the cretaceous and subsequent adaptive radiation of lepidopterans and hymenopterans. Paleontology is typically interested in larger fauna as they are more telling of the paleoclimate and more readily found through fossils.
Also, competiton between mammals and large seabirds doesn't mean they can't co-exist. Giant penguins and plotoprrids co-existed with whales for several tens of million years
Still, the giant penguins couldn't quite make that final leap as fully marine Vertebrates. They were still land locked somewhat because of those pesky eggs!😅
@@kinglyzard evolving live birth takes a long time if they hadnt gone extinct maby they couldve gotten there similar too how mosasaurs plesiosaurs and ichtyosaurs did it
Honestly, i think it's far more likely for loons to evolve into a fully-aquatic form than penguins, in fact, they are already kind of becoming one, since they literally cannot walk with their legs, and besides that, i think that their buoyancy and their flexible necks would help them fill a niche distinct from cetaceans and pinnipeds.
They can't walk because their legs have shifted horizontally in order to be better swimmers. Penguins are more marine than them, and it seems wing propelled divers get better at reaching larger sizes, like extinct penguins and plotopterids
@@Carlos-bz5oo Yes, but since penguins can still walk and stay on land, while loons are just as clumsy as a seal, i believe they have a better shot at eventually becoming >fully aquatic
@@Carlos-bz5ooThey lay their eggs on buoyant nests, meanwhile penguins have to lay their eggs on dry land. In a way, loons are ahead of penguins when it comes to aquatic reproduction. Also, animals like mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and ichtyosaurs descended from egg-laying reptiles, and have each evolved live birth independently from each other, so there's nothing stopping birds from evolving the same.
@@darkonyx6995 Birds and turtles have hard-shelled eggs; they cannot get rid of them, because they rely on the shell's calcium deposits for the embryo to develop a skeleton. Remember, aquatic birds have had since the Cretaceous to produce viviparous forms, yet none did.
The penguin whale was one of the two creatures from After Man I had major issues with (the other being the parachute gliding shrew). With the penguin whale you have two issues. The first being that no birds give live birth. The second being that penguins hatch covered with down and grow waterproof feathers as they mature. This two facts made the penguin whale seen especially unbelievable,
@@kinglyzard in theory yes? Like, sea snakes today are ovoviviparous and it was probably the case for some time in lineages of some extinct marine reptiles
I mean, chicks being hatched/born with waterproof feathers already developed could be a feature developed prior to becoming a full-time aquatic species, since being born ready to swim could be a great advantage.
I could imagine they would overcome this handicap later on, but by then the pinnipeds, ceteceans, mustelids, and rodents would have already taken up most of the niches so they would be stuck as sea birds and aquatic birds. Might we see the rise of hesperornids again?
Honestly there’s quite a few spec Evo tropes “bird whales, predatory rodents or primates, domesticated animals dominate” that are probably better off as seed worlds
One big problem(perhaps several) I have with this idea is that birds have small heads. It's been ingrained in them for a long time and with a small head therefore it'll be hard for them to develop the proper jaw size to compete in the sea. Birds have also evolved to be light creatures, hollow bones, wings, small heads, thin sharp beaks for most of them. They'd have to radically change to truly fill that niche which I don't think they'd be able to do honestly. I also like your view on this, marine mammals are in fact that best terrestrial tetropods to have evolved yet, should they all go extinct for some reason, i don't see why birds specifically rather than reptiles or other mammals evolving towards the sea, or perhaps fishes or cethlopods might lock that niche away from theropods. Marine mammals(especially cetaceans) are in their place of the dominance in the sea for a reason. Ig they only thing that'll truly eliminate them is either a KT level or perhaps a Permian level event, or if we want to do it easily and quickly just make humans do it, they're far more dangerous than any volcano or meteorite.
many birds can swallow way bigger things than they seems capable. Their mouths are bigger than just the beak. Have you see an owl swallowing a rat whole?
40:27 Was this video a whole powerpoint presentation?! On a more serious note I love videos like these talking more in depth about specevo tropes! Much like the Unnatural History Channel you both have a number of points on how to do animal biology more accurately. Instead of following previous works like gospel (AfterMan/FisW), criticizing them is important as well. Videos like this may slow down my own specevo project, but at the same time I'm grateful for the information within them! All in all great video, I hope you get more subs, and why weren't Mosasaurs mentioned?
Although if you were wondering if it's possible for a marine mammal to convergently evolve into something like a mosasaurs, we already know the answer is yes. The prehistoric whale "Basilosaurus" was named the "King Lizard" because it looked so much like a mosasaur that the palaeontologists thought it was one.
@@wolfpackastrobiology3690 I was more curious on how Mosasaurus were able to become so dominant in the Cretaceous, despite the present of both Ichthyosaurs and Plesio/Pliosaurs already dominate in the waters...
@@pumaconcolor2855 but they haven't taken over from cetaceans as megafauna per se. Sea turtles occupy completely different niches to marine mammals with the closest convergence being with sea cows.
27:12 Actually except the Mesosaurs, there were marine Temnospondil amphibians and with new finds from Spitsbergen it appears that the Ichthyosaurs had their start in the late Permian, survived the End Permian extinction and diversified into the Triassic, so there were secondary aquatic tetrapods even back then.
my current explanation for humans being extinct on earth in my future earth spec evo is that they left earth after a zombie apocalypse and had to remain on their colonies as they unintentionally took it with them and have to start over again on the other worlds, too busy to worry about earth.
I definitely could see seabirds getting bigger but the limit is hauling themselves onto land to lay eggs. It is unlikely that they’d internalize the egg laying or have floating eggs. A large semiaquatic and flying bird is possible. The standing up posture isn’t the only posture and could allow for more on land hunting as well. A small filter feeding whale like seabird does seem possible.
Nice video and for me It seems that the only for birds to frill the niches of marine mammals is a seedworld like Serina as their won't be any competition for the niche.
Penguin Whales The Cringe Explanation: climate change wiped out all of the marine mammals. The Based Explanation: spec-evo worldbuilders actively went out of their way to kill off all of the marine mammals. Jokes aside, this is an excellent video! Something that came to mind was the decline of ichthyosaurs during the early Cretaceous, and their subsequent replacement by other large marine reptiles such as short-necked plesiosaurs and mosasaurs.
I like this vid, very in depth and well researched. I was brainstorming an idea for a future earth spec evo, and wanted antarctica to migrate into the tropics where it would be the land of birds and whales, so getting ideas and critiques on the penguin-whale trope was enlightening and fresh. I like your ideas for alternatives to whales and seals as well as what could happen to whales and seals as well. gives me some ideas for the project.
the path i imagine for a seed world project i have been working on a little has penguins transition to a fully aquatic lifestyle by adapting a throat incubation strategy for their eggs and early young.
just let the seabirds like penguins raise theyr chicks like literally other semi aquatic birds do like goose ,ducks ,, loons where the may develope live birth but then the chuicks float to the surface and only get to dive when old enough loons will also carry theyr babysx on the back same goes for swans you can easily imagine an ful laquatic bird just staying near the surface with them acting as an living island while the partner gets food
The mass extinction effects most animals and sea birds being the uniquely lucky ones is unlikely but also needing to account for their food sources and plants the live among.
Thank you for the excellent breakdown of this complex and interesting topic. I always viewed this trope as lazy and unrealistic. Some may argue that certain sea birds already compete with whales for krill and schooling fish, they just do it in their own way: they are numerous and small, often finding the bait balls and krill swarms faster then the whales. I wonder if biomass of the seabirds is actually greater than that of the whales feeding on similar foods (I believe Darren Naish mentioned something like this on his podcast). In any case, even when birds feed on the same food as whales, they do not evolve similar features. There is also the viviparity thing. It is unprecedented in birds, and I think it will take them an unreasonably strong selection to gain it. Mammals are simply “preadapted” to becoming fully aquatic with their preexisting viviparity. Finally, I wonder how viable modern bony fishes for replacing cetaceans, especially when taken into account ability to breath air and limited endothermy in some of the modern groups.
Would the presence of humans really prevent biodiversity (including megafauna diversity) from bouncing back? Prehaps humanity can develop a society that can coexist with nature.
22:04 I’m not sure this is a good argument. You could have said the same thing about mammals evolving to fill bird niches, if you lived before bats evolved. About anything, really, before they evolved to fill a new niche for the first time. Regardless, I’m sure it’s not unimportant that birds have never evolved precocious ovoviviparity, which would seem to be required for any of them to become fully aquatic. That would probably have to happen first, before any new niches open up for them.
Honestly great video! I do wanna ponder fully aquatic birds in a speculative context. But on another question that you may have gotten before, given your knowledge on the topic. If your cool to respond despite it being a little unrelated. What is your thoughts on certain big spec evo projects if your knowledgable on much of them. Like Kaimere, Serina, or maybe even some of the many startups popping up. Though to get a bit more out there and general with the question. What is your thoughts on a speculative evo sonario of Mesozoic fauna [66 million years ago pre asteroid] vs Cenozoic fauna [about 1 million ish years ago. Modern but before our current extiction/the expansion of man]. As time examples as those tend to be the most common rough times where the two worlds speculatively butt heads. Either case sorry for the somewhat possibly loaded question but still loved the video, and it was quite informative in how I may go about things.
Convergent evolution is where two organisms develop similar adaptations to fill the same niches independently of another. Mimicry is where one animal mimics some aspect of another to fool predators or prey but the mimicker doesn't have to necessarily occupy a similar niche to the animal it's mimicking. But in this video [th-cam.com/video/5J_6mFEI7Qw/w-d-xo.html] I gave an example (the genet and ringtail) of something that looks like convergent evolution but isn't.
The explanation for humans becoming extinct in the end would be due to mass starvation due to collapse mass desertification, urbanization and collapse in marine food resources, and mass infertility caused by microplastics and industrial pollutants, which accumulate generationally and damage the genome. Since the human reproductive system is relatively vulnerable to pollutants compared to other animals, these other animals would survive. Another plausible possibility of human extinction cause would be particularly infectious prions(such as a human equivalent to scrapies), due to to medical research being unlikely to ever be able to treat prion diseases.
3 other extinction events larger than 4 of the big 5 occurred as far as extinction rates go, but no one mentions them. ~ 520 MYA, ~ 500MYA and ~260MYA. What is the reason(s)?
This is what gets me with spec-evolution writers: it's fun for the imagination to pretend humanity would go inexplicably extinct and not think that we wouldn't already be taking most animal life along with us to our own doom. *Humans on earth make up 2.5% of all animal biomass left on Earth,* which is an actually big percentage that's gonna be hard to ever get rid of us all short of another Everest-size comet hitting the world again. And with the impact we're leaving on the Earth right now, it might as well be like a giant asteroid. Which circles back into kinda contradicting the entire spec-evo thing in imagining what life would appear if there's gonna be a mass-extinction level event that 2.5% of our collective biomass won't be able to pull through in a million years. 2.5% of animal biomass is big enough that as well be AN ENTIRE TAXONOMIC CLASS by itself, and that's just ONE species: us humans. We literally aren't going anywhere unless the world's entire food chains collapses completely and it's something you don't want to think about what crazy animals will appear in 1 million years and beyond. ... There's half as many insects today as there were 20 years ago. Yaaaaay for our heavy use of chemical pesticides removing what most wild animals live off on! And our entire fish stock is on track to be depleted in 40 years, so it honestly makes the whole idea of penguins - which all eat fish - taking over the whales' niche pretty meaningless. Thank your local Chinese government why things like overfishing are that bad now.
well penguins and other small seabirds can stil leat /hunt stuff liek lantenrfish that humans will /cannot eat you forgettign that humans are super squishy we are only able to survive in most places thanks to buildings AC and other stuff cause we can get vacciantet agaisnt viruses and cause we have a steady food supplie to satisfie our high demand but a lot of food on earth is inedible for us a lot of plants and mushrooms can straight up kill you but animals can eat that just fine just see places like texas or claifornia where humans have AC runnign 24/7 and still aslmsot die on heat strokes you really thin such an creature will survive when thers a logn period of blackouts or whole electric stuff fucks up cause of a sunstorm we take over 20 years to mature 9 month pregnancy that is already extremyl hard on the womans body cause the head of the child is to big in the end and if thers not all is super sterile and clean infection are super easy to happen combined with our shitty imunsystem we made ourself with non stop vaccinating and stuff isnt the best ther was one cold year somewhere in the 18th hudnrets that was slightly colder then other years so crops didnt grow so well and a shit load of humans starved to death and that was just 1 single bad year even that we have so much food left our hight demand on food will kill us off in the end literally cause we would depelad everythign faster then it can regrow
What if fully aquatic oviviviparous sea bird or water bird decendents evolve in other places besides the oceans like in lakes, rivers or some seas independently and then, for a while, coexist with future cetaceans, pinnipeds, or any future mammal competing for the aquatic niche?
Spec evo doesn't have to be so rational. Its an imagination of a future, not a recreation of the past. It can be, of course, if you want, but there is much more creative freedom than with speclative paleoart for example.
The scientific knowledge is top-notch but the logical through-line that forms the skeleton of this piece is hard to follow. Disregarding anthropogenic impact on extinction patterns in spec evo settings that are based on the question of "What will happen if humans (i.e., primarily noted for being the source of anthropogenic impacts) existed, had an impact, and then disappeared?" Attacking the starting premises of a spec evolution exercise due to that fact that it might be improbable (but, as you later say, still possible) before the first creature can even be speculated upon, effectively killing the exercise before it begins. Requiring fleshed-out explanations for starting premises based off humans having an impact on the ecosystem before disappearing, while stating that examining HOW humanity left the world the way it is mixes anthropology and speculative biology in a way that should be avoided. Attempting to argue that speculative evolution exercises can still be a fun and creative endeavour while limiting the starting premise to the most probable scenarios, then using as examples: 1. small toothed cetaceans re-creating leviatitan ("what if small whale, but big?"); 2. what if walrus, but big?; and 3. what if a whale that superficially looks like a small ichthyotitan, but big? Yes, in some cases it might be more likely for an organism to adopt body plans that closely related species have adopted in the past (i.e., effectively recreating the extinct animals) but strictly limiting yourself to previously existing body-plans is neither creative nor fun. Why bother recreating leviatitan from cetacean relatives, recreating paracetus from aquatic mammals and recreating icthyotitan from an cetacean? Convergent evolution being what it is, it would be difficult to distinguish a leviatitan from a "small toothed whale that turned into a large toothed whale occupying the same niche as a leviatitan" without cutting them open. By gate-keeping speculative evolution to requiring only the "most probable" premises, while leaving very little room for entirely new body plans, you're limiting evolution to having genera endlessly rehashing the same body-forms for millions to hundreds of millions of years.
The attitude of pushing the blame onto humans for future mass extinctions kinda makes it seem like the author is dropping nuance and the potential humanity has to right our wrongs in order to present a narrative. Like, I understand if you're just interpreting it through a fictional lens, but as far as science goes, conditions are subject to change, so why is humanity getting its act together any less strange as birds replacing marine mammals for said authors?
What do you think of the possibility of crocodiles or monitor lizards to evolve to be semi or fully aquatic marine animals which would locally outcompete marine mammals in areas of very low ocean productivity and warm water, due to their lower metabolisms?
In tropical areas reptiles are more prominent but mammals are still dominant. But if we look to the past marine mammals did share the oceans with some pretty large marine reptiles like rhamphosuchus and paleophis colosseus so while I don't think a warmer climate would eliminate marine mammals I do think some giant marine reptiles could find their place in the seas.
@@wolfpackastrobiology3690 Yeah that is true. Are there currently large amounts of pinniped colonies on Australian and Oceania coastlines tho? We do notice that pinnipeds, when presented with limited amounts of food, evolve to be smaller, as with the Caspian, monk and nerpa seal, tho this mainly applies to closed bodies of water. In the case of the Caspian and black seas, the beluga sturgeon l, due to its lower metabolism, came to be the most massive macropredator (reaching up to 7m) in those bodies of water instead of a marine mammal, until humans caused it to be doomed to certain extinction(tho seals in the black sea and Caspian also bece nearly extirpated. I could imagine such a case happening on other areas of the globe assuming pinnipeds continue to suffer due to overpopulation and global warming destroying their nursing habitats
Honestly sea snakes are really slept on in these discussions. They're doing super well right now and never leave the water for anything(Hydrophiines, not sea kraits).
I think the main thought processes behind the belief that anthropogenic climate change will cause mass extinction among all marine megafauna are: -its not only climate change but pollution and overexploitation of marine resources. The thinking is that within 200 years, the oceans will become so polluted with things such as microplastics and fertilizers, that whales and their prey species won't have enough time to adapt to them since the ocean got concentrated so rapidly with them. -overfishing of animals like sardines, herring, krill, anchovy, assuming it continues at the current rate, will cause a complete collapse in their population, due to current estimates that up to now, they have lost 40-95% of their original biomass due to human harvesting. Thus, from there comes the thinking that all whales will become extinct due to not only environmental changes but competition with humans. We see how overfishing has caused starvation among otherwise cosmpolitan whale populations, such as orcas around puget sound, due to the local extinction of salmon there. -if humans in alternate history continued industrially hunting all whales at rates of the 1930s-1940s(like 170000 humpback whales killed per year for example) for their oil and meat, one can assume, that within a century the vast majority of whales would become extinct, with the possible exception of porpoises and dolphins(though they were industrially hunted for meat too), and t6his would open niches for other animals once humans go extinct. -most whale species evolved in cooling climate(which cooled slower than the planet is warming now), so it would be hard for them to evolve in the reverse. Ocean acidication and disruption of ocean currents would cause nutrient upwelling to drastically reduce, thus dooming most baleen whales. What do you think of these factors?
As for overfishing, while it would have posed a serious problem to the population of great whales 200 years ago, now their population is so low they can easily sustain themselves on what's left. Not to mention that many of the large baleen whales nominally hunt krill which is hardly a staple seafood. But as for pollution, yeah it's a problem to pretty much all marine animals high on the trophic level but seabirds aren't exempt in that regard. Not only that, some populations of Dolphins have fairly low trophic levels (down to 3.25) so while pollution can and indeed does take a heavy toll on marine mammals, I can't see it wiping them out: www.int-res.com/articles/meps_oa/m699p167.pdf As for having evolved in a cooling climate, so did everything else since the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum but that doesn't mean that they're doomed if the weather gets warmer. On top of that, many modern marine mammals like spinner dolphins live in the tropics so I doubt a warming climate would doom them.
@@wolfpackastrobiology3690 Arent staple foods of both baleen whales and toothed whales, such as herring, salmon, mackerel, albacore, sardines, still crashing due to unsustainable fishing practices due to ever increasing demand in developing countries?
with all due respect, You started giving examples of niche swaps after saying all the niche swaps are lacking creativity. What make your niche swaps "better" than the ones you talked down to? I think we should just let people enjoy their imaginations. I disagree with your entire video.
Having a living animal evolve to resemble something that lived in the past involves more creativity than swapping out something that lives today with something else. This is because even though we have a basic idea of what the prehistoric animal was like, there's still allot we don't know about it and this gives you more room to explore in a spec evo scenario. Meanwhile, swapping a living animal out with another one and have the future species have the same ecology as the extant one you replaced it with takes less creativity. Basing a futuristic animal off something else isn't the same as just replacing one with the other. And I'm not preventing people from deciding what to do with their imaginations, I'm just giving my opinion on how likely they are.
@@wolfpackastrobiology3690 Ah, so you think niche swaps with extinct animal is somehow "more creative" than niche swap with extant animal. ... disagree. Both require equal amount of creativity. Wanna know what's the definitely more creative work? Entirely new niche created by entirely new environment.
@@sueanoimm Again, they don't require an equal amount of creativity because there's allot we don't know about the role that the extinct animal filled so there's allot more you need to fill in so using an extinct animal as a template is going to involve more creativity. And to clarify, you can use living animals as a template, but there's a difference between using other species (past or present) as a template and simply eliminating an entire group and have all the niches they filled with another group (i.e. whales and penguins). While not as creative as entirely new environments, the former is still more creative than the latter. When engaging in realistic spec evo, there's a balance between being creative and staying grounded and the replacing one group with another often times doesn't accomplish either.
What shows a lack of creativity is not just "niche swaps" or certain species developing similar adaptations to others, it's eliminating entire groups and having another just doing the same niches the eliminated group does.
@@wolfpackastrobiology3690 So instead of the author eliminating existing niche holder and replace them, it's somehow better that nature eliminated that - then the author replaces them? no. i just really don't think either of those forms are lesser than. they are both good and fun.
Fantastic video. There's been a strange "backlash" against mammals in Spec Evo that part of me blames on the desire for projects not be be seen as "mundane" while another part of me sees it as a backlash against the older idea of mammals being superior to "less evolved" animals like dinosaurs.
I think another part is that people often overlook smaller animals just because sea birds aren’t marine mega fauna doesn’t mean there not successful given how diverse they are today
I think its the backlash to the idea that mammals are the "most advanced" compared to dinosaurs
@@troutinspace5427 all animals that are alive are successful honestly. Life is hard.
I think its more due to nicknames like "age of reptiles" and "age of mammals" most people would want to make a new clade rise up for their new age
@@golira19 iwould more say cause mamals are more or less the group today with the least members ( i could be wronge)
but def it would today not the age of mammals but literalyl the age of insects ,,thers like more beetles then everythign else combined
@@Kurominos1 It's been that way since the carboniferous though. That term doesn't refer to which clade is the most populous, it refers to the main group of megafauna dominating a geological era. Hence the "age of dinosaurs" which almost certainly also had more insect biomass especially due to the angiosperm revolution of the cretaceous and subsequent adaptive radiation of lepidopterans and hymenopterans. Paleontology is typically interested in larger fauna as they are more telling of the paleoclimate and more readily found through fossils.
Also, competiton between mammals and large seabirds doesn't mean they can't co-exist. Giant penguins and plotoprrids co-existed with whales for several tens of million years
Still, the giant penguins couldn't quite make that final leap as fully marine Vertebrates.
They were still land locked somewhat because of those pesky eggs!😅
@@kinglyzard true, but that hasn't stopped reptiles like mosasaurs from developing live birth
@@kinglyzard evolving live birth takes a long time if they hadnt gone extinct maby they couldve gotten there similar too how mosasaurs plesiosaurs and ichtyosaurs did it
Honestly, i think it's far more likely for loons to evolve into a fully-aquatic form than penguins, in fact, they are already kind of becoming one, since they literally cannot walk with their legs, and besides that, i think that their buoyancy and their flexible necks would help them fill a niche distinct from cetaceans and pinnipeds.
They can't walk because their legs have shifted horizontally in order to be better swimmers. Penguins are more marine than them, and it seems wing propelled divers get better at reaching larger sizes, like extinct penguins and plotopterids
@@Carlos-bz5oo Yes, but since penguins can still walk and stay on land, while loons are just as clumsy as a seal, i believe they have a better shot at eventually becoming >fully aquatic
@@darkonyx6995 But they still lay eggs on land, a feature no bird has managed to overcome
@@Carlos-bz5ooThey lay their eggs on buoyant nests, meanwhile penguins have to lay their eggs on dry land. In a way, loons are ahead of penguins when it comes to aquatic reproduction. Also, animals like mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and ichtyosaurs descended from egg-laying reptiles, and have each evolved live birth independently from each other, so there's nothing stopping birds from evolving the same.
@@darkonyx6995 Birds and turtles have hard-shelled eggs; they cannot get rid of them, because they rely on the shell's calcium deposits for the embryo to develop a skeleton. Remember, aquatic birds have had since the Cretaceous to produce viviparous forms, yet none did.
The penguin whale was one of the two creatures from After Man I had major issues with (the other being the parachute gliding shrew). With the penguin whale you have two issues. The first being that no birds give live birth. The second being that penguins hatch covered with down and grow waterproof feathers as they mature. This two facts made the penguin whale seen especially unbelievable,
Correct me if i'm wrong, but didn't the penguin whales in After Man hatch their eggs in marsupial like pouches?
@@DJuuJ
Could the Echidna method really work underwater?
@@kinglyzard in theory yes? Like, sea snakes today are ovoviviparous and it was probably the case for some time in lineages of some extinct marine reptiles
I mean, chicks being hatched/born with waterproof feathers already developed could be a feature developed prior to becoming a full-time aquatic species, since being born ready to swim could be a great advantage.
I could imagine they would overcome this handicap later on, but by then the pinnipeds, ceteceans, mustelids, and rodents would have already taken up most of the niches so they would be stuck as sea birds and aquatic birds.
Might we see the rise of hesperornids again?
I guess the only exception would be seed worlds, such as serina.
Honestly there’s quite a few spec Evo tropes “bird whales, predatory rodents or primates, domesticated animals dominate” that are probably better off as seed worlds
@@troutinspace5427 that makes sense. It would be the most reasonable and believable way for those things to happen.
One big problem(perhaps several) I have with this idea is that birds have small heads. It's been ingrained in them for a long time and with a small head therefore it'll be hard for them to develop the proper jaw size to compete in the sea. Birds have also evolved to be light creatures, hollow bones, wings, small heads, thin sharp beaks for most of them. They'd have to radically change to truly fill that niche which I don't think they'd be able to do honestly.
I also like your view on this, marine mammals are in fact that best terrestrial tetropods to have evolved yet, should they all go extinct for some reason, i don't see why birds specifically rather than reptiles or other mammals evolving towards the sea, or perhaps fishes or cethlopods might lock that niche away from theropods.
Marine mammals(especially cetaceans) are in their place of the dominance in the sea for a reason.
Ig they only thing that'll truly eliminate them is either a KT level or perhaps a Permian level event, or if we want to do it easily and quickly just make humans do it, they're far more dangerous than any volcano or meteorite.
many birds can swallow way bigger things than they seems capable. Their mouths are bigger than just the beak. Have you see an owl swallowing a rat whole?
40:27 Was this video a whole powerpoint presentation?!
On a more serious note I love videos like these talking more in depth about specevo tropes!
Much like the Unnatural History Channel you both have a number of points on how to do animal biology more accurately.
Instead of following previous works like gospel (AfterMan/FisW), criticizing them is important as well.
Videos like this may slow down my own specevo project, but at the same time I'm grateful for the information within them!
All in all great video, I hope you get more subs, and why weren't Mosasaurs mentioned?
I didn't think Mosasaurs was that relevant to this topic.
Although if you were wondering if it's possible for a marine mammal to convergently evolve into something like a mosasaurs, we already know the answer is yes. The prehistoric whale "Basilosaurus" was named the "King Lizard" because it looked so much like a mosasaur that the palaeontologists thought it was one.
@@wolfpackastrobiology3690 I was more curious on how Mosasaurus were able to become so dominant in the Cretaceous, despite the present of both Ichthyosaurs and Plesio/Pliosaurs already dominate in the waters...
Just gonna say penguins had alot if time to become fully marine before mammals did
I don't think birds have the capacity of live birth which would be key for an air breathing marine animal to completely commit
@@bri1085 marine turtles and pinnipeds are born on land.
@@pumaconcolor2855 but they haven't taken over from cetaceans as megafauna per se. Sea turtles occupy completely different niches to marine mammals with the closest convergence being with sea cows.
@@bri1085 You said that an air breathing animal needs to be able to give live birth to commit to a fully aquatic life style.
About 61 millions years of time. (When the first penguins evolved)
27:12 Actually except the Mesosaurs, there were marine Temnospondil amphibians and with new finds from Spitsbergen it appears that the Ichthyosaurs had their start in the late Permian, survived the End Permian extinction and diversified into the Triassic, so there were secondary aquatic tetrapods even back then.
anyother trope I don't like is how they dismiss human survival or just say humans left the earth. i know it will cause debate but still
my current explanation for humans being extinct on earth in my future earth spec evo is that they left earth after a zombie apocalypse and had to remain on their colonies as they unintentionally took it with them and have to start over again on the other worlds, too busy to worry about earth.
@@vomothytigan5377 so kind of like dune? i like it!
@@b_radbrad8899 I didn't know that's what happened in Dune but ok that's cool
I definitely could see seabirds getting bigger but the limit is hauling themselves onto land to lay eggs. It is unlikely that they’d internalize the egg laying or have floating eggs. A large semiaquatic and flying bird is possible. The standing up posture isn’t the only posture and could allow for more on land hunting as well. A small filter feeding whale like seabird does seem possible.
Nice video and for me It seems that the only for birds to frill the niches of marine mammals is a seedworld like Serina as their won't be any competition for the niche.
Another great video! Loved your ideas for realistic spec evo at the end!
So far zero bird species has gone to giving live birth. Which would be necessary for penguins to reach extremely large sizes.
Penguin Whales
The Cringe Explanation: climate change wiped out all of the marine mammals.
The Based Explanation: spec-evo worldbuilders actively went out of their way to kill off all of the marine mammals.
Jokes aside, this is an excellent video! Something that came to mind was the decline of ichthyosaurs during the early Cretaceous, and their subsequent replacement by other large marine reptiles such as short-necked plesiosaurs and mosasaurs.
I like this vid, very in depth and well researched.
I was brainstorming an idea for a future earth spec evo, and wanted antarctica to migrate into the tropics where it would be the land of birds and whales, so getting ideas and critiques on the penguin-whale trope was enlightening and fresh.
I like your ideas for alternatives to whales and seals as well as what could happen to whales and seals as well. gives me some ideas for the project.
the path i imagine for a seed world project i have been working on a little has penguins transition to a fully aquatic lifestyle by adapting a throat incubation strategy for their eggs and early young.
just let the seabirds like penguins raise theyr chicks like literally other semi aquatic birds do like goose ,ducks ,, loons
where the may develope live birth but then the chuicks float to the surface and only get to dive when old enough
loons will also carry theyr babysx on the back same goes for swans you can easily imagine an ful laquatic bird just staying near the surface with them acting as an living island
while the partner gets food
The mass extinction effects most animals and sea birds being the uniquely lucky ones is unlikely but also needing to account for their food sources and plants the live among.
Thank you for the excellent breakdown of this complex and interesting topic. I always viewed this trope as lazy and unrealistic. Some may argue that certain sea birds already compete with whales for krill and schooling fish, they just do it in their own way: they are numerous and small, often finding the bait balls and krill swarms faster then the whales. I wonder if biomass of the seabirds is actually greater than that of the whales feeding on similar foods (I believe Darren Naish mentioned something like this on his podcast). In any case, even when birds feed on the same food as whales, they do not evolve similar features. There is also the viviparity thing. It is unprecedented in birds, and I think it will take them an unreasonably strong selection to gain it. Mammals are simply “preadapted” to becoming fully aquatic with their preexisting viviparity. Finally, I wonder how viable modern bony fishes for replacing cetaceans, especially when taken into account ability to breath air and limited endothermy in some of the modern groups.
Another genuinely good channel to add to the collection...
Would the presence of humans really prevent biodiversity (including megafauna diversity) from bouncing back? Prehaps humanity can develop a society that can coexist with nature.
It would help immensely if we threw down our arms, stopped using all these pesticides and chemicals and found some clean damn energy.
Penguins, like Turtles still need to haul themselves onto land to laid their eggs.
22:04 I’m not sure this is a good argument. You could have said the same thing about mammals evolving to fill bird niches, if you lived before bats evolved. About anything, really, before they evolved to fill a new niche for the first time.
Regardless, I’m sure it’s not unimportant that birds have never evolved precocious ovoviviparity, which would seem to be required for any of them to become fully aquatic. That would probably have to happen first, before any new niches open up for them.
Honestly great video! I do wanna ponder fully aquatic birds in a speculative context. But on another question that you may have gotten before, given your knowledge on the topic. If your cool to respond despite it being a little unrelated.
What is your thoughts on certain big spec evo projects if your knowledgable on much of them. Like Kaimere, Serina, or maybe even some of the many startups popping up. Though to get a bit more out there and general with the question. What is your thoughts on a speculative evo sonario of Mesozoic fauna [66 million years ago pre asteroid] vs Cenozoic fauna [about 1 million ish years ago. Modern but before our current extiction/the expansion of man]. As time examples as those tend to be the most common rough times where the two worlds speculatively butt heads.
Either case sorry for the somewhat possibly loaded question but still loved the video, and it was quite informative in how I may go about things.
Could you make a video on the differences between Mimicry and convergent evolution and possibly other types of convergent evolution?
Convergent evolution is where two organisms develop similar adaptations to fill the same niches independently of another. Mimicry is where one animal mimics some aspect of another to fool predators or prey but the mimicker doesn't have to necessarily occupy a similar niche to the animal it's mimicking.
But in this video [th-cam.com/video/5J_6mFEI7Qw/w-d-xo.html] I gave an example (the genet and ringtail) of something that looks like convergent evolution but isn't.
The explanation for humans becoming extinct in the end would be due to mass starvation due to collapse mass desertification, urbanization and collapse in marine food resources, and mass infertility caused by microplastics and industrial pollutants, which accumulate generationally and damage the genome. Since the human reproductive system is relatively vulnerable to pollutants compared to other animals, these other animals would survive. Another plausible possibility of human extinction cause would be particularly infectious prions(such as a human equivalent to scrapies), due to to medical research being unlikely to ever be able to treat prion diseases.
I wonder if air breathing fish like lungfish or marine tetrapods would do better against anoxic events.
Idea: macropredatory marine turtles
Maybe hollow bones the extreme retraction of the tail bones are part of the reason birds never managed to become major aquatic fauna.
penguins have solid bones and an extremely small tail didn’t seem to stop various other groups like turtles or plesiosaurs
Think evolving into seal like creatures would make more sense
That's as far as any bird or turtle can go.😢
@@kinglyzard I was thinking of an 🦦,mink,shrew
Fun fact! They already did.
The great auk and loons are basically that.
3 other extinction events larger than 4 of the big 5 occurred as far as extinction rates go, but no one mentions them. ~ 520 MYA, ~ 500MYA and ~260MYA. What is the reason(s)?
This is what gets me with spec-evolution writers: it's fun for the imagination to pretend humanity would go inexplicably extinct and not think that we wouldn't already be taking most animal life along with us to our own doom. *Humans on earth make up 2.5% of all animal biomass left on Earth,* which is an actually big percentage that's gonna be hard to ever get rid of us all short of another Everest-size comet hitting the world again.
And with the impact we're leaving on the Earth right now, it might as well be like a giant asteroid. Which circles back into kinda contradicting the entire spec-evo thing in imagining what life would appear if there's gonna be a mass-extinction level event that 2.5% of our collective biomass won't be able to pull through in a million years.
2.5% of animal biomass is big enough that as well be AN ENTIRE TAXONOMIC CLASS by itself, and that's just ONE species: us humans. We literally aren't going anywhere unless the world's entire food chains collapses completely and it's something you don't want to think about what crazy animals will appear in 1 million years and beyond.
...
There's half as many insects today as there were 20 years ago. Yaaaaay for our heavy use of chemical pesticides removing what most wild animals live off on! And our entire fish stock is on track to be depleted in 40 years, so it honestly makes the whole idea of penguins - which all eat fish - taking over the whales' niche pretty meaningless. Thank your local Chinese government why things like overfishing are that bad now.
well penguins and other small seabirds can stil leat /hunt stuff liek lantenrfish that humans will /cannot eat
you forgettign that humans are super squishy we are only able to survive in most places thanks to buildings AC and other stuff
cause we can get vacciantet agaisnt viruses and cause we have a steady food supplie to satisfie our high demand
but a lot of food on earth is inedible for us a lot of plants and mushrooms can straight up kill you but animals can eat that just fine
just see places like texas or claifornia where humans have AC runnign 24/7 and still aslmsot die on heat strokes
you really thin such an creature will survive when thers a logn period of blackouts or whole electric stuff fucks up cause of a sunstorm
we take over 20 years to mature
9 month pregnancy that is already extremyl hard on the womans body cause the head of the child is to big in the end
and if thers not all is super sterile and clean infection are super easy to happen combined with our shitty imunsystem we made ourself with non stop vaccinating and stuff isnt the best
ther was one cold year somewhere in the 18th hudnrets that was slightly colder then other years so crops didnt grow so well
and a shit load of humans starved to death
and that was just 1 single bad year
even that we have so much food left our hight demand on food will kill us off in the end literally
cause we would depelad everythign faster then it can regrow
What if fully aquatic oviviviparous sea bird or water bird decendents evolve in other places besides the oceans like in lakes, rivers or some seas independently and then, for a while, coexist with future cetaceans, pinnipeds, or any future mammal competing for the aquatic niche?
Actually you are wrong about that, there were marine creatures that returned to the ocean before Igosuars, some Amphibians.
if all whales go extinct somehow then seals are more likely too replace em in my opinion
Spec evo doesn't have to be so rational. Its an imagination of a future, not a recreation of the past.
It can be, of course, if you want, but there is much more creative freedom than with speclative paleoart for example.
The scientific knowledge is top-notch but the logical through-line that forms the skeleton of this piece is hard to follow.
Disregarding anthropogenic impact on extinction patterns in spec evo settings that are based on the question of "What will happen if humans (i.e., primarily noted for being the source of anthropogenic impacts) existed, had an impact, and then disappeared?"
Attacking the starting premises of a spec evolution exercise due to that fact that it might be improbable (but, as you later say, still possible) before the first creature can even be speculated upon, effectively killing the exercise before it begins.
Requiring fleshed-out explanations for starting premises based off humans having an impact on the ecosystem before disappearing, while stating that examining HOW humanity left the world the way it is mixes anthropology and speculative biology in a way that should be avoided.
Attempting to argue that speculative evolution exercises can still be a fun and creative endeavour while limiting the starting premise to the most probable scenarios, then using as examples:
1. small toothed cetaceans re-creating leviatitan ("what if small whale, but big?");
2. what if walrus, but big?; and
3. what if a whale that superficially looks like a small ichthyotitan, but big?
Yes, in some cases it might be more likely for an organism to adopt body plans that closely related species have adopted in the past (i.e., effectively recreating the extinct animals) but strictly limiting yourself to previously existing body-plans is neither creative nor fun.
Why bother recreating leviatitan from cetacean relatives, recreating paracetus from aquatic mammals and recreating icthyotitan from an cetacean?
Convergent evolution being what it is, it would be difficult to distinguish a leviatitan from a "small toothed whale that turned into a large toothed whale occupying the same niche as a leviatitan" without cutting them open.
By gate-keeping speculative evolution to requiring only the "most probable" premises, while leaving very little room for entirely new body plans, you're limiting evolution to having genera endlessly rehashing the same body-forms for millions to hundreds of millions of years.
I think the largest of whales are doomed, seals could survive though. I do wonder why the Desmostylians went extinct though
Okay.😊
The attitude of pushing the blame onto humans for future mass extinctions kinda makes it seem like the author is dropping nuance and the potential humanity has to right our wrongs in order to present a narrative. Like, I understand if you're just interpreting it through a fictional lens, but as far as science goes, conditions are subject to change, so why is humanity getting its act together any less strange as birds replacing marine mammals for said authors?
What do you think of the possibility of crocodiles or monitor lizards to evolve to be semi or fully aquatic marine animals which would locally outcompete marine mammals in areas of very low ocean productivity and warm water, due to their lower metabolisms?
In tropical areas reptiles are more prominent but mammals are still dominant. But if we look to the past marine mammals did share the oceans with some pretty large marine reptiles like rhamphosuchus and paleophis colosseus so while I don't think a warmer climate would eliminate marine mammals I do think some giant marine reptiles could find their place in the seas.
@@wolfpackastrobiology3690 Yeah that is true. Are there currently large amounts of pinniped colonies on Australian and Oceania coastlines tho? We do notice that pinnipeds, when presented with limited amounts of food, evolve to be smaller, as with the Caspian, monk and nerpa seal, tho this mainly applies to closed bodies of water. In the case of the Caspian and black seas, the beluga sturgeon l, due to its lower metabolism, came to be the most massive macropredator (reaching up to 7m) in those bodies of water instead of a marine mammal, until humans caused it to be doomed to certain extinction(tho seals in the black sea and Caspian also bece nearly extirpated. I could imagine such a case happening on other areas of the globe assuming pinnipeds continue to suffer due to overpopulation and global warming destroying their nursing habitats
Honestly sea snakes are really slept on in these discussions. They're doing super well right now and never leave the water for anything(Hydrophiines, not sea kraits).
I think the main thought processes behind the belief that anthropogenic climate change will cause mass extinction among all marine megafauna are:
-its not only climate change but pollution and overexploitation of marine resources. The thinking is that within 200 years, the oceans will become so polluted with things such as microplastics and fertilizers, that whales and their prey species won't have enough time to adapt to them since the ocean got concentrated so rapidly with them.
-overfishing of animals like sardines, herring, krill, anchovy, assuming it continues at the current rate, will cause a complete collapse in their population, due to current estimates that up to now, they have lost 40-95% of their original biomass due to human harvesting. Thus, from there comes the thinking that all whales will become extinct due to not only environmental changes but competition with humans. We see how overfishing has caused starvation among otherwise cosmpolitan whale populations, such as orcas around puget sound, due to the local extinction of salmon there.
-if humans in alternate history continued industrially hunting all whales at rates of the 1930s-1940s(like 170000 humpback whales killed per year for example) for their oil and meat, one can assume, that within a century the vast majority of whales would become extinct, with the possible exception of porpoises and dolphins(though they were industrially hunted for meat too), and t6his would open niches for other animals once humans go extinct.
-most whale species evolved in cooling climate(which cooled slower than the planet is warming now), so it would be hard for them to evolve in the reverse. Ocean acidication and disruption of ocean currents would cause nutrient upwelling to drastically reduce, thus dooming most baleen whales.
What do you think of these factors?
As for overfishing, while it would have posed a serious problem to the population of great whales 200 years ago, now their population is so low they can easily sustain themselves on what's left. Not to mention that many of the large baleen whales nominally hunt krill which is hardly a staple seafood. But as for pollution, yeah it's a problem to pretty much all marine animals high on the trophic level but seabirds aren't exempt in that regard. Not only that, some populations of Dolphins have fairly low trophic levels (down to 3.25) so while pollution can and indeed does take a heavy toll on marine mammals, I can't see it wiping them out:
www.int-res.com/articles/meps_oa/m699p167.pdf
As for having evolved in a cooling climate, so did everything else since the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum but that doesn't mean that they're doomed if the weather gets warmer. On top of that, many modern marine mammals like spinner dolphins live in the tropics so I doubt a warming climate would doom them.
@@wolfpackastrobiology3690 Arent staple foods of both baleen whales and toothed whales, such as herring, salmon, mackerel, albacore, sardines, still crashing due to unsustainable fishing practices due to ever increasing demand in developing countries?
Dinosaur is just really bad at taking the fully aquatic niche.
Humanity’s population is dropping now.
Spec evo enthusiasts will always say "climate change" and will never actually show earth's climate changing.
with all due respect, You started giving examples of niche swaps after saying all the niche swaps are lacking creativity. What make your niche swaps "better" than the ones you talked down to? I think we should just let people enjoy their imaginations. I disagree with your entire video.
Having a living animal evolve to resemble something that lived in the past involves more creativity than swapping out something that lives today with something else. This is because even though we have a basic idea of what the prehistoric animal was like, there's still allot we don't know about it and this gives you more room to explore in a spec evo scenario. Meanwhile, swapping a living animal out with another one and have the future species have the same ecology as the extant one you replaced it with takes less creativity. Basing a futuristic animal off something else isn't the same as just replacing one with the other.
And I'm not preventing people from deciding what to do with their imaginations, I'm just giving my opinion on how likely they are.
@@wolfpackastrobiology3690 Ah, so you think niche swaps with extinct animal is somehow "more creative" than niche swap with extant animal. ... disagree. Both require equal amount of creativity. Wanna know what's the definitely more creative work? Entirely new niche created by entirely new environment.
@@sueanoimm Again, they don't require an equal amount of creativity because there's allot we don't know about the role that the extinct animal filled so there's allot more you need to fill in so using an extinct animal as a template is going to involve more creativity. And to clarify, you can use living animals as a template, but there's a difference between using other species (past or present) as a template and simply eliminating an entire group and have all the niches they filled with another group (i.e. whales and penguins). While not as creative as entirely new environments, the former is still more creative than the latter. When engaging in realistic spec evo, there's a balance between being creative and staying grounded and the replacing one group with another often times doesn't accomplish either.
What shows a lack of creativity is not just "niche swaps" or certain species developing similar adaptations to others, it's eliminating entire groups and having another just doing the same niches the eliminated group does.
@@wolfpackastrobiology3690 So instead of the author eliminating existing niche holder and replace them, it's somehow better that nature eliminated that - then the author replaces them? no. i just really don't think either of those forms are lesser than. they are both good and fun.
41:58 HEY I drew that :)
Good job!
@@OceanMachine_ thanks :)
I was really surprised seeing it in the vid, kinda got whiplash tbh 😅
Great Video. This reminds me of Unnatural History Channels Spec Evo videos. 😄😁
I thought uhc would do a video on this trope eventually
@@rylanbrewer3320 I recommended he do that in a comment on one of his videos.
@@rylanbrewer3320did the rodents as megafauna trope
@wolfpackastrobiology3690 you after he didnt; "fine, I'll do it myself"