"Evolution's most unbelievable solutions..."

Nature Talk
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“…to Life’s biggest problems”

So goes the title lead-in to a book someone gifted to me recently that I found a delightful read.

The book?

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I’m posting this in response to all the ‘for the love of…’ and ‘what’s your favourite…’, and ‘What’s the cutest’ kind of posts we have here recently because….

Well, for me – it’s nice to share favourites and pretty colours and such, don’t get me wrong. But what really does it for me is all the weird and barely believable adaptations Life makes out there. That’s really where the sizzle of natural observing is for me.

I just love those ‘Huh? No way!’ moments when you see or hear, or read yet about another incredible way a species has found to survive and take on seemingly impossible problems.

Anyhow… not here to pitch the book, but I just wanted to say that for me, it helped refocus what I really love about nature observing: freakiness!

Everything alive (including humans) is an amazing collection of adaptations that solve real problems. The ‘freakiness’ label? It’s subjective of course, but the stranger stories usually are ones that make us look at ourselves and think, hmm – maybe we’re really weird too!

Or, they come from the extemists – the ones that worked out something rarely seen elsewhere.

And as we develop new tools, and new data that list of freakiness just keeps on growing. Mysteries and secrets revealed!

It’s a weird world, the world of life. Gloriously so, right? So what are some of your favourite moments of discovering new ‘UNBELIEVABLE solutions’?

How about sharing some of your OWN weird, factual discoveries about the species we find? What have you seen? Heard? Read about? Let’s play ‘Believe it or Not’ and salute the near infinite creativity of the living world!

In short… let’s FREAK OUT!
(Naturally)

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“Evolution’s most unbelievable solutions to life’s biggest problems”

I guess the main problem in life, with regard to evolution, is usually sex (reproduction).

Plants (vascular and otherwise) have some unbelievable solutions.

Lots of parasites have unbelievably complicated life cycles involving multiple hosts.

And then there are the groups that opt out of sex entirely: parthenogenesis, cloning, etc.

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I’ve thought about writing a book called The Flower’s Snare in English, or xrula xlura in Lojban, about flowers that kidnap pollinators, but I don’t know enough about them to write the book.

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Maybe you could start with an iNat journal post. You could use AI as a research assistant, of course verifying all the AI claims by asking for links to journal articles, iNat observations, etc.

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Great idea for a thread; this is the kind of stuff I enjoy too! I’ve been (slowly) falling down the rabbit hole of learning about parasites for the last few years. I really like how Annie Dillard frames them in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

Parasitism: this itch, this gasp in the lung, this coiled worm in the gut, hatching egg in the sinew, warble-hole in the hide—is a sort of rent paid by all creatures who live in the real world with us now. It is not an extortionary rent: Wouldn’t you pay it?

Maybe those of us who enjoy observing parasites should tithe even more, not that I’d jump at the chance. :face_with_tongue:

To give a concrete example that’s been stuck in my mind: dwarf mistletoes (Arceuthobium) are parasites on conifers, mostly in western North America and Mexico, and they are themselves hosts to several species of fungal parasites (e.g. Caliciopsis arceuthobii). Parasite-on-parasite action is called hyperparasitism! Some of these parasitic chains are remarkably specific, with each parasite almost exclusively feeding on the organism above it in the chain.

Of course, I tell my coworkers about the pretty orchids I see, instead. :wink:

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Inat has a journal posf on the subject of hyperparisitism, according to Jonathon Swift:

https://inaturalist.nz/journal/susanhewitt/31916-great-fleas-have-little-fleas-upon-their-backs-to-bite-em

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One wild evolutionary niche I found out about recently is workerless, socially parasitic queen ants that live in colonies that can have multiple queens. They are a separate species that only produces more queens and drones of its own species

In workerless inquilines, queens are entirely dependent on their hosts for food and their eggs are cared for and raised to maturity by the host workers.

https://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Inquilinism

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Sometimes, paying the parasite is better than the alternative. Some parasites, such as certain worms, downregulate our immune responses but no longer cause much damage after their long evolutionary association with us. However, if the parasites are eliminated, we become much more likely to develop allergic or autoimmune disease.

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The alteration of animal behaviour by fungi still sort of creeps me out, biology degrees notwithstanding.

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One thing that weirds me out about humans (one of many) is how our eyes develop from the same clump of cells that eventually form brains. That does explain a lot about the essence of eyes, to me at least. Oh! One more general awesome system is protein production in cells. How it plays out with molecular electromagnetic charges like an assembly line off the RNA and after it’s built the RNA dissolves into its components again, which continue to float in the cell. Cellular mechanisms in general are incredible.

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