To see what you eat

With the imagination and creativity of an artist’s commune, the Cambrian explosion is believed to have produced almost all the body plans on earth today within a geologically short period of perhaps 30 million years (540–510 million years ago) or less. All but one of the extant phyla, and the basic body plans they represent, had their beginnings in this period. Furthermore, in a spectacular display of metazoan bloom, evolution forged several other phyla in this same period that are now extinct, although perhaps not as many as some enthusiasts believe. It was the big bang of evolution. Curiously, the first known eyes appeared then, too, and there may be a relation.

Predation is a terrible and swift sword for prey species and there is good evidence that predation drives evolution, at least to some extent. Sensory modalities drive predation. After all, the predator must find the prey. Vision is the most far ranging and comprehensive sense and must be a principal facilitator for predation. Auditory sense must be entrained, hence cannot be as efficient or as global as vision, and although it is an excellent sensory modality, we recognise auditory predators as exceptions—for example, bats, dolphins.

So, …