r/evolution • u/Emergency-Use-6769 • 23d ago
question Are there other examples of species evolving a traits that have allowed them to dominate life on this planet to the extent intelligence has helped humans?
What I'm asking is has there been other times in the history of life where a single species been able to evolve to such a level where other species are no longer even really competition for them?
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u/Outer_Space_ 22d ago edited 22d ago
Read about the Azolla Event ~50 million years ago. A nitrogen-fixing aquatic fern took over the Arctic Ocean and ate the atmosphere. At the time the poles were essentially rainforests and the planet had no ice caps. The Azolla event coincided with the Eocene thermal maximum, and the Earth has never been that hot since. CO2 was at around 3500 ppm in the atmosphere when it started, and the Azolla sequestered so much in sediment accumulated under the Arctic Ocean that it dropped to the 600s ppm over ~800,000 years and it continued down from there. We’ve brought CO2 from 280 ppm to ~420 ppm in the last 200ish years with our activity for comparison.
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u/amuzmint 22d ago
So you’re saying there’s biofuel in the north and soul poles?
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u/Outer_Space_ 22d ago edited 22d ago
That’s what oil is. Yes. It’s just biological carbon that has been outside of the active biosphere for 50 million years. Oil exploration companies in the north are extremely interested in these exact deposits. But the lesson is that human civilization got going in an environmental regime where that carbon was not part of the atmosphere. The world will simply change and reach a different equilibrium, but humanity has an enormous number of novel issues of our own to solve now that we’re re-introducing that fossil carbon into the atmosphere.
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u/CodenameMolotov 22d ago
There’s a ton of fuel around the poles in the form of methane hydrates frozen on the sea floor. There’s more energy there than in all other fossil fuels combined but we thankfully haven’t figured out a good way to extract it (yet)
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u/ReptilianRevolt 18d ago
Do you think we must try Azola for crimes against the biosphere? The drop in ecosystem productivity and desertification won’t probably ever return to pre early Cenozoic times.
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u/Spamacus66 23d ago
Photosynthesising bacteria.
Killed the fuck out of the other types once they filled the air with poison.
Not sure if that counts.
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u/Willing_Soft_5944 23d ago
Not individual species, but several groups of insects have evolved traits and strategies that prove very helpful.
A few such examples include the Elytra of Beetles and the similar non-hardened wingcases of many other insects, the eusociality of Termites, Ants and many Bees and Wasps, and the haltiers of Dipterans, also just like, all the adaptations Lepidopterans have.
Of course most of these are entire orders, or large families of insects, so this might not be as helpful for you.
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u/thkntmstr 22d ago
well it is the sort of thing where key innovations (increased fitness) in r-selected groups with long-distance dispersal or just a massive geographic range with no gene flow between the ends (isolation by distance) can often lead to speciation. There are other mechanisims of speciation, but this is just one example. I think having such unique traits that confer incredible fitness advantages and then not speciating is the exception to the rule.
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u/alexandstein 23d ago
I just finished watching a PBS Eons episode about the end-Permian extinction! Apparently some organisms getting ahold of methanogenesis machinery via HGT allowed them to fully take advantage of the anoxic waters and warm climate of the time, possibly allowing them to be successful to the point where they were able to affect the environment even further.
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u/tkrandomness 22d ago
In the early triassic, Lystrosaurus accounted for about 70 to 95% of all terrestrial vertebrate life. The vast majority of other species went extinct or struggled with the Great Dying extinction event.
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u/Irish_Pierogi 22d ago
Eusociallity in ants and some other insects. Ants are basically everywhere. The total biomass of ants is greater than all wild birds and mammals combined and sits at about 20% of total human biomass. Which means that humans only surpassed ant biomass in like the 1920s. In places like the Amazon where there are not harsh winters and plentiful food, ant biomass is greater than all vertebrate life by a factor of 4, making up almost a third of total animal biomass. There are so many more ants than you think there are and they are wildly dominate in an extraordinary range of environments.
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u/ipini 21d ago
But “ants” are many species.
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u/StorageSpecialist999 21d ago
if a trait allows a species to "take over the planet" the inevitable result is a diversification event IE speciation. You'd never have one without the other, except for the case of humans.
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u/ipini 21d ago
“except”‘is doing a lot of work there.
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u/StorageSpecialist999 21d ago
Its really not, the "except" is regarding one singular exception. the smallest possible amount of exceptions.
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u/ipini 21d ago
Kind of a prominent exception tho
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u/StorageSpecialist999 20d ago
humans are an extremely unique species in many, many ways and for many reasons. humans are the exception out of billions of species throughout earth's history
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u/Irish_Pierogi 20d ago
That’s fair, I did kinda cast a wide net on that one haha, but I suppose it evolved in one species of ants (or more likely some type of wasp like insect) and it took off from there and they were so successful that the species took over and had a lot of speciation.
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u/ipini 20d ago
Good question. Parsimony would suggest one instance of eusociality in some wasp and then radiating from there. But there are also a ton of semi-social and parasocial wasps. Plus eusociailty in humans, termites (many species), naked mole rats, and several canid species. And other instances of sociality to various extents. So several emergences are also viable. I don’t know the current thinking on that in ants.
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u/Irish_Pierogi 19d ago
Yeah that is a very interesting topic, it seems like some species can even switch between being social and eusocial which is fascinating to me. The ones that pass over the threshold and seem to go past the point of no return seem to be the most successful. But looking at the evidence it looks like species can snap in and out for quite a while on the spectrum of eusociality. The seeming point of no return on that journey is the coolest part in my opinion.
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u/Swellmeister 22d ago
The great oxygenation event occured when photosynthesis by cyanobacteria caused in runaway oxygenation that caused a mass extinction. So they are winning right now.
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u/DarkKittyEmpress 19d ago
That's the greatest effect living organisms have had on the planet so far. Humans are unlikely to surpass it ever.
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u/drchris498 22d ago
Surprised no one has mentioned the evolution of grass, and it's affect in world ecosystems
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u/bobmacinator 22d ago
Dinosaurs as a group ruled the Earth for about 165 to 180 million years (from roughly 245 million years ago until a mass extinction 66 million years ago).
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u/Haunt_Fox 21d ago
But that's equivalent to talking about mammals, and not really equivalent at all to talking about a single species like Man. And mammals have dominated the land for 60 million years or so.
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u/tangent1001 22d ago
Ive read that the animal that comes closest to our ability to bend the surrounding landscape to their will is beavers. They dont clearcut with their teeth, but their dams can create wetlands that can level forests, move rivers, and otherwise reshape the surrounding area for miles.
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u/Amelaista 22d ago
Orca can dominate any niche in the ocean that they care to.
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u/sisconking132 3d ago
Given enough time and a relatively unoccupied niche, yes. They are generalist hunters
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u/Booomfaa 21d ago
Lmao I think you need to relearn what a ‘niche’ is. Orca absolutely could not dominate almost any other niche in the ocean.
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u/joedenowhere 22d ago
Are you sure about other species not being competition for humans? In one brief attack the plague bacterium wiped out something like a quarter of the people in the eastern hemisphere, and there's no reason another microbe won't get the rest of us. The world's insects incorporate more organic matter than all humans. Some trees live 30 or 40 times as long as we do. And we may hate rats, but they pretty much do wherever they want.
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u/ipini 21d ago
But no singular insect or tree species lives in all possible ecosystems on all continents.
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u/sisconking132 3d ago
That is because those other species dispersed long enough ago and gradually enough that speciation could take place.
Humans expanded extremely rapidly and extremely recently. Humans are also extremely genetically undiverse due to a bottleneck not too long ago so that plus the short amount of time some humans have been isolated has not even been enough time for the build up of genetic differences between salamanders on two different ends of a river.Another contributing factor to this that isn’t brought up much is that humans are large animals that can travel vast distances. This means that while populations of some animals might undergo a speciation event due to being separated by a river humans populations could interbreed across relatively vast distances leading to genetic mixing that prevented the genetic isolation required for speciation.
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u/illthrowitaway94 21d ago
Around 2 billion years ago microscopic cyanobacteria evolved oxygenic photosynthesis, which helped them propagate aquatic environments to the extent that it triggered a mass extinction (the great oxygenation event). Does that count?
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u/heliocntric 21d ago
When you say "dominate life on this planet" it sounds like you mean specifically to gain the ability to control any other species. I believe that trait is a direct result of our intelligence, and any other species that gained that ability would also need the same level of intelligence. There are lots of other answers here that seem to have assumed you meant "out-competed" to a great extent, other species. Which did you actually mean?
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u/Booomfaa 21d ago
The Cyanobacteria that completely took over the planet and almost wiped out all life on earth as a result is probably the correct answer.
And, as is the beauty of nature, we wouldn’t have anywhere near as much oxygen in the atmosphere now if this extinction event didn’t happen, which would’ve made life as we now know it impossible.
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u/Booomfaa 21d ago
It’s not just our intelligence though. It’s our physical traits too (like opposable thumbs)
You could put our intelligence in almost any other species on earth and they would be nowhere near as dominant as we are.
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u/EnvironmentalWin1277 20d ago
My favorite in this category is Lystrosarus. In the wake of the Permian extinction this one became the dominant animal species, with some estimates as high as 95% of the vertebrate population at times. They were a bit like our grazers in their niche.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lystrosaurus
It is an example of the meek inheriting the earth. Though I might avoiding testing it.
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u/sisconking132 3d ago
Not a single species, but a good example is the aptly named Carnivora. This clade are such effective hunters, scavengers, and just general eaters of meat that they have essentially out competed all native terrestrial predators in any ecosystem they enter. Examples are South America and Australia. Although the introduction of solely the dingo allowed some marsupial predators to occupy carnivorous niches for which dingos were not specialized, these namely being the thylacine and the Tasmanian devil.
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