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 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 other realities [...]  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 that corals themselves [...]  … 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 crops up in the popular scientific press all [...] I bet you never wondered why the black ghost knifefish hunts at an uncomfortable angle of -30°! Prepare to take a journey on the intersection of animal behaviour, neurobiology and biomechanics! Suppose you’re one of your animal ancestors, swimming around in one of the warm and shallow Cambrian seas 500 million years ago. You’re a [...] Life is hard for free-living microbes. Many of them undertake great efforts to obtain their energy, some get it directly from sunlight while others derive it from unusual compounds. To them, living inside an animal gut must be like living in some mythical land of plenty. Consider the luxuries! The lucky resident of a gut [...] Think of an animal – any animal you’d like. Unless you’re a big fan of sponges or jelleyfish, or a protistologist perhaps, you likely thought of an animal that belongs to the Bilateria. This group includes all animals that show bilateral symmetry, so every single insect, vertebrate and mollusk belongs to this group. Like in [...] |
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