TY  - JOUR
AB  - Understanding how animals evolve to become parasites is key to unravelling how biodiversity is generated as a whole, as parasites could account for half of all species richness. Two significant impediments to this are that parasites fossilize poorly and that they retain few clear shared morphological features with non-parasitic relatives. Barnacles include some of the most astonishingly adapted parasites with the adult body reduced to just a network of tubes plus an external reproductive body, but how they originated from the sessile, filter-feeding form is still a mystery. Here, we present compelling molecular evidence that the exceedingly rare scale-worm parasite barnacle Rhizolepas is positioned within a clade comprising species currently assigned to Octolasmis, a genus exclusively commensal with at least six different phyla of animals. Our results imply that species in this genus-level clade represent an array of species at various transitional stages from free-living to parasitic in terms of plate reduction and host-parasite intimacy. Diverging only about 19.15 million years ago, the route to parasitism in Rhizolepas was associated with rapid modifications in anatomy, a pattern that was likely true for many other parasitic lineages.
A1  - Watanabe, H. K.
A1  - Uyeno, D.
A1  - Yamamori, L.
A1  - Jimi, N.
A1  - Chen, C.
DO  - 10.1098/rsbl.2022.0550
JO  - Biology Letters
N1  - The host taxon genus, Laetmonice, is misspelled at every usage as Laetomonice [sic]
IS  - 202205501-6
SP  - (20220550):1
EP  - 6
C1  - 19(20220550):1-6
TI  - From commensalism to parasitism within a genus-level clade of barnacles
UR  - https://marinespecies.org/afremas/aphia.php?p=sourcedetails&id=454224
VL  - 19
PY  - 2023
Y2  - 2026-07-22
ER  -