Talk:Lancelet#Group-exclusive terms need better explanation and framing

In Asia, they are harvested commercially. -- what for? Food? If so, what sort of food? --Spudtater 00:31, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

:Yes, for food. Both for humans and animals. I wonder how it tastes. Would like to try it made in the same way as fish and chips.

"Today, amphioxus may be extremely common in shallow sandy environments: at Discovery Bay, Jamaica, up to five thousand individuals per square meter of sand have been reported. In some parts of the world, amphioxus are eaten by humans or by domestic animals; they are important food items in some parts of Asia, where they are commercially harvested."

::From [http://www.americanscientist.org/template/Login;jsessionid=aaa5LVF0?nextpage=AssetDetail&assetid=15499&page=3&message=PageAccessDeniedMessage American Scientist] :

::"Lancelets in a bay near Xiamen, China, evidently supported a fishery for at least a few hundred years. The muscular animals were either eaten fresh (they taste like herring) or were dehydrated by roasting in a little oil and used as an additive for other dishes."

::If they taste like herring, they doesn't taste bad at all. 193.217.193.154 17:54, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Look at this :

"In common with the vertebrates, lancelets have a nerve cord running along the back, pharyngeal gill slits and a tail that runs past the anus. Also like humans, the muscles are arranged in blocks called myomeres. Unlike the invertebrates, however, ..."

Why "humans" ? Only humans and lancelets do have myomeres, really ?

What about other vertebrates between them ?

: They are trying to emphasize that humans came from Lancelets. And they did. <--rookie error, humans did not come from lancelets. However the common ancestor of humans and lancelets would have been similar to modern day lancelets. Modern lancelets would still have evolved somewhat from this ancestor, but have retained many of the primitive features (hence they are interesting).

The major "textbook view" of Chordate subphylum relationships places the lancelets as a sister-group to the vertebrates. This is the picture presented in cladograms by both Brusca & Brusca (Invertebrates, Sinauer Associates 2003) and Miller & Harley (Zoology, McGraw-Hill 2007), as well as the Three of life project. This wikipedia article, however, appears very biased in expressing the other view, which is placing Urochordates as a basal group.

Stating neutrality as a goal, wikipedia articles should try not to take stands in ongoing debates. I have seen the "newer research suggests that" argument used in advocacy of both of the vertebrate sistergroup views; it is thus not very convincing unless one also states what kind of evidence there is for either view.--Gunnar Mikalsen Kvifte (talk) 06:58, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

The accepted view today is that urochordates are closer to vertebrates and lancelets farer away. This is supported by papers in the most prestigious journals. See [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16049193 Blair and Hedges 2005], [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16495997 Delsuc et al 2006], [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16733531 Vienne and Pontarotti 2006] and [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17051155 Bourlat et al 2006] --Maximilianh (talk) 22:34, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

I agree with the last user (Maximilianh): The issue has been settled, as evidenced by a string of high-profile studies relying on modern methods of phylogenetics. See also the wikipedia article on Chordates and references [46][47][48][49]. The statement that lancelets are the closest living invertebrate relatives of vertebrates is wrong and should be corrected. In particular the figure caption presents the old and superseded view as a fact: "The lancelet is a small, translucent, fish-like animal that is the closest living invertebrate relative of the vertebrates.[33][34]" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.76.223.13 (talk) 15:35, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

You can use this ( Image:Lancelet's circulatory system scheme.png) excellent image for your article ^___^. Also you can translate the article about amphioxus from Russian Wikipedia --LameClock (talk) 11:18, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

How big it is? Could some one provide the detailed average dimensions (metric units please) of an adult lancelet? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.163.42.93 (talk) 22:31, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

The anatomical drawing of the lancet labels the finger-like projections near the mouth as ″13. mimosa″ Is that correct? I can't find that usage of mimosa anywhere else on Wikipedia or the web (though it may just be difficult to find on the web due to other more common uses). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.55.200.20 (talk) 15:27, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

What symmetry are juveniles missing? Anatomic symmetry, meaning they're not bilaterally symmetric as the adults are? Kanenas (talk) 20:43, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

I did a search on Google Scholar for each of the species listed here, filtering for hits since the year 2000. The number to the left of each item indicate how many hits it got. As a measure of scientific and taxonomic validity, this is obviously WP:OR. On the other hand, it is a replicable measure of notability (WP:NOTABLE).

17 Asymmetron inferum

78 Asymmetron lucayanum

1 Epigonichthys australis

0 Epigonichthys bassanus

0 Epigonichthys cingalensis

7 Epigonichthys cultellus

5 Epigonichthys hectori

29 Epigonichthys maldivensis

0 Branchiostoma africae

0 Branchiostoma arabiae

0 Branchiostoma bazarutense

2420 Branchiostoma belcheri

2 Branchiostoma bennetti

1 Branchiostoma bermudae

38 Branchiostoma californiense

0 Branchiostoma capense

68 Branchiostoma caribaeum

0 Branchiostoma clonaseum

20 Branchiostoma elongatum

3510 Branchiostoma floridae

0 Branchiostoma gambiense

7 Branchiostoma indicum

207 Branchiostoma japonicum

1350 Branchiostoma lanceolatum

0 Branchiostoma leonense

1 Branchiostoma longirostrum

10 Branchiostoma malayanum

0 Branchiostoma moretonense

39 Branchiostoma nigeriense

43 Branchiostoma platae

16 Branchiostoma senegalense

0 Branchiostoma tattersalli

33 Branchiostoma virginiae

Zyxwv99 (talk) 02:19, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Lancelets produce GFP. I added an updated diagram based off of recent literature (2017).

(Single Eukaryote | talk | 22:16, 13 January 2021 (UTC))

the following citations occur in #Habitat and these need to be added as references:

Webb and Hill, 1958; Webb, 1958; Boschung and Gunter, 1962; Cory and Pierce, 1967; Gosselck and Spittler, 1979; Caccavale et al., 2021b; Desdevises et al., 2011

Stokes and Holland, 1996a; Stokes, 1996

Zhang et al., 2001 Marci68 (talk) 20:23, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

I think this very good article lets itself down a bit in the end, where dates for major splits between spits in the phylum Chordata shown are clearly far to recent. As there are well accepted different chordate-lineages as fish (Haikouichthys) and tunicates (Shankouclava) found 518 million years ago, the split between craniates and tunicates must have happened way before that, I would suggest at least 60 million years needed to get such major differences in bodyplans (so > 580 mya). If the Ediacaran fossil Burykhia hunti is indeed a tunicate, for which the article from Fedonkin makes a very pursuasive case, than we are in the > 615 mya regions. The split between Cephalochordates and Olifactares was even earlier. That is also consistent with many genomic articles on basic timelines of major splits. Codiv (talk) 14:34, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

: Whatever you find "convincing" is irrelevant. I I'm not particularly attached to the numbers, but I think they represent effectively minimum split ages rather than true divergence ages {{tq|I would suggest at least 60 million years needed to get such major differences in bodyplans}} is just baseless personal speculation. We base article content on what sources say, not our personal opinions. Hemiauchenia (talk) 20:23, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

For now finished with the rough polishing of the article I was working on (mainly revamping the history section). But there are still some problems that need fixing for which I lack the necessary expertise.

This article uses a lot of terminology that is only used for this group of animals, but that is not made clear in the article and this article is effectively the only real source of information on these that is not a scientific paper.

And even with a fairly good grasp on biology; these things are so alien in many ways that one is very quickly stumped trying to read certain papers as they heavily rely on a breadth of information exclusive to this group.

It would be great if somebody who, unlike me, actually knows things about these could do some work in that are.

For now I have just tweaked the structure a bit and italicized some terms to make it a bit clearer that they are specific and don't find general use outside biology.

The main culprits are the photosensitive structures:

- "Joseph cell"

- "Hesse organs"

- "lamellar body"

There's just no easily accessible information on these and I hit the limit of my understanding of biology to do anything meaningful about this.

The most problematic one is "lamellar body" as "lamellar bodies" is an existing Wikipedia article about an organelle found in lung tissue, which makes this use here quite confusing as this article doesn't say what they are and the article of that name is about something in an organ these animals don't possess. SkSlick (talk) 22:09, 10 June 2025 (UTC)