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 Scientists from the University of Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada have discovered photosynthetic algae living inside embryonic cells of the spotted salamander, providing them with extra power like a mean green energy drink. If true, this is the first known example of a vertebrate acquiring a new symbiont. The spotted salamander [...]  An end to the blogging hiatus at last! I hope to entertain you with the fascinating story on how female wasps got rid of their men and sex in return for bacterial endosymbionts.. Despite the obvious benefits of pleasure and procreation, sex has other advantages. The genetic material of both parents gets mixed in [...] 
You might not think much of sponges. Maybe you feel that they’re only good for rubbing your back and cleaning your kitchen sink. While you’re absolutely right that sponges have to be admired for their absorbing qualities, they have much more to offer this world. Like on the front of early animal evolution: [...] 
This is the first blogpost in a continuing series on “sensible evolution‘: how our senses evolved and shape the way we see the world. We perceive everything that we can see and feel as ‘real’, but we know that our human senses only capture a tiny part of the natural world. There are [...] 
Last week’s blog post on the ancestry of the malarial plasmid attracted several insightful comments by Psi Wavefunction. One of the issues discussed was when exactly the malarial ancestor changed his lifestyle from being a coral symbiont to a coral parasite. This week I came across a paper in PNAS that shows [...]  … except in Hollywood movies. Let’s make this clear from the start, I don’t like the term “living fossils” at all. It’s as if we decided that certain species are second class organisms that should have gone extinct a long time ago. Unfortunately for me, the term regularly crops up in the popular scientific press. Especially [...] |
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