Ants represent one of the most striking cases of convergent evolution on Earth. Thousands of species, from spiders to crickets have evolved to resemble ants through a process known as Myrmecomorphy. Myrmecomorphy takes different shapes: sometimes, insects are trying to enter an ant’s nest undetected, a strategy known as Wasmannian mimicry. In other cases, the goal is to fool a potential predator by looking like an ant, or Batesian mimicry. Why do animals evolve into ants?
Category: Evolution
Seaweed for sceptics: ammonoids and brown algae
Welcome to the next issue of the Seaweed for Sceptics series. The first post of the series explored the rough origin of the red algae, showing the genetic impariment that these seaweed suffer as a result of their extreme origins. In this second post we shall focus on one of these weird connections that crop…
Seaweed for sceptics (I): a rough origin for the red algae
Seaweeds are one of those things we might take for granted. Even many biologists would call this fleshy marine algae “dull” or “uninteresting” (we guess they’d be called seaweed sceptics?). One of the points of this blog is to show that life’s magnificence is to be found everywhere, if you are open to it….
On elephants and bacteria 