from Hacker News

A recent study suggests that insects branched out from crustaceans

by Carrok on 4/11/25, 8:19 PM with 90 comments

  • by adrian_b on 4/12/25, 7:42 AM

    The title should mention the 2023 year, as reference for "recent".

    As explained in the article, this is actually old news.

    There has been more than a decade since it is well known that the hexapods a.k.a. insects have evolved from within a certain group of crustaceans, which includes the water fleas.

    The 2023 research paper linked in the article has only provided stronger evidence for this.

    The main implication of this discovery is that the myriapods (e.g. millipedes and centipedes) are much more remotely related to insects than it has been believed in the past and they have adapted to a terrestrial life completely independently and much earlier than the insects (the invasion of the land by major animal groups has happened in the order myriapods, then arachnids, then hexapods a.k.a. insects, then tetrapod vertebrates, by a coincidence in decreasing order of the number of legs).

  • by Imnimo on 4/11/25, 10:09 PM

    I'm so used to seeing the "fish crawling onto the shore" cartoon of evolution that I assumed the branching always went that way - land creatures are branchoffs of sea creatures. But surely this is oversimplified - are there examples in the other direction, where a branching occured in land animals and one branch then returned to the sea?

  • by abeindoria on 4/11/25, 11:04 PM

    I strongly suggest reading Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish" which explains a bit more on how different bits etc evolved if you're interested in the topic.

  • by dboreham on 4/11/25, 9:50 PM

    Makes sense: a coastal cave is a great environment where an organism can experiment with moving from water to land.

    This article also nicely highlights how some scientists can just make stuff up, subsequently overturned when someone finds a fact-based way to evaluate their erroneous conclusions. See also archeology.

  • by nmstoker on 4/12/25, 12:23 AM

    For a fairly science focused article I was a little surprised they referred to "bugs" in the casual / technically incorrect manner, as covered here:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect#Distinguishing_featur...

  • by willis936 on 4/11/25, 9:12 PM

    I suspect crustacean allergies are actually arthropod allergies. I haven't seen much research on this though.

  • by ljsprague on 4/11/25, 9:24 PM

  • by anigbrowl on 4/11/25, 10:55 PM

    I'm surprised to learn anyone thought otherwise.

  • by upghost on 4/12/25, 3:16 AM

    whoa whoa whoa I was told everything evolves into crabs[1]:

    [1]: https://xkcd.com/2314/

  • by fallat on 4/11/25, 11:07 PM

    This seems so obvious

  • by dang on 4/11/25, 10:43 PM

    [stub for offtopicness]

  • by epicureanideal on 4/12/25, 12:26 AM

    Is this part of an "eat bugs" marketing push?

    "Bugs are just miniature lobsters". If anything, makes me not want to eat crustaceans.