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RE: Nocturnal encounters: Aardwolves of the Kalahari

in #biology7 years ago

I love hearing about your adventures.

his diet consists primarily of Trinervitermes, a fact which keep them out of conflict with other myrmecophages, as these termites secrete a compound most animals find repellent.

Evolution sure is amazing. Animals can develop just about any kind of defense, and sooner or later another species will come along that finds them delicious.

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What's also very interesting is when an 'arms race' occurs between two particular species that leads to crazy specialization and adaptation in each. Certain beetles being able to process plant compounds from a particular genus of plants for example that are utterly toxic to everything else. I will probably do a post on that at some point :)

Oh please do - I've loved reading about these arms races since Richard Dawkins started talking about them in The Selfish Gene.

This summer I was moving a stone wall and I uncovered some spiders that were the most horrifying things I'd seen. But I looked them up and discovered that they subsist entirely on those roly-poly pill bugs that eat dead wood.

Imagine if we'd evolved to eat just one food. In a few thousand years our descendants might live exclusively on high-fructose corn syrup.