B is for Biology

Talking Bio with UCSB Professor Alice Alldredge

For this edition of Curioser and Curioser, Martha Sadler sent
questions via email to UCSB professor Alice Alldredge (pictured), who is the chair of
the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine
Biology and teaches the animal kingdom portion of the
university’s introductory biology series. The professor, a marine
biologist who personally studies zooplankton (also pictured below), explained
that “these were odd questions” but managed to entertain our
queries successfully. So here we go.

1) Is there any sense to the notion that animals are
mutated and evolved forms of plant, that they retain some plant
characteristics?

Animals and plants form two major kingdoms in the classification
of organisms. Both kingdoms arose from one-celled protists. Keep in
mind that the ability to photosynthesize does not define whether
something is a plant or not. Many algae, which are protists, can
photosynthesize and are not classified as plants. The protists that are ancestral to
plants had the ability to photosynthesize while those that are
directly ancestral to animals did not. However, plants and animals
do share a protistan ancestor from very long ago. Thus they share
many cellular characteristics and actually have some common
genes.