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#evolution

61 posts56 participants11 posts today
Public
Chris Jags

Evolution is so goofy.

What if, instead of being a weak, defenceless creature that can only eat one kind of algae (or whatever) and lives in one tiny area of the world, you evolved into something which could be tough AND easily able to defend itself AND ate both that algae PLUS all kinds of other things if times got tough, AND lived all over the map?

Some one put me in charge of evolution FFS 😄

#animals#Evolution
Public
Lukas VFN 🇪🇺

Ancient #fossil sheds big light on #evolution enigma, solving a 100-year arthropod mystery
phys.org/news/2025-04-ancient-

"#Helmetia expansa belongs to a rare group of early #arthropods called concilitergans, close relatives of #trilobites. Unlike trilobites, concilitergans lacked calcified exoskeletons, so their remains only fossilized under exceptional conditions—like those in the 508-million-year-old #BurgessShale of Canada, where even soft tissues like guts, legs, and gills were preserved."

Illustration of a prehistoric invertebrate animal with a flat segmented spiky shield-like shell
Public
flypapers

📰 "Insects fight low-dose infections with terminal investment, not innate immunity"
biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20
#DrosophilaMelanogaster
#Evolution
#Drosophila #Immunity #Adult

bioRxiv · Insects fight low-dose infections with terminal investment, not innate immunityThough the innate immune system is considered to be the primary defence promoting survival against pathogenic microbes, non-immunological strategies may provide cost-effective responses against ubiquitous low-dose infections. However, research using model systems has yet to develop a framework for systematically varying topical exposure doses, much less for examining how hosts mitigate the fitness costs associated with immune deployment. Here, we demonstrate that insects respond to low-dose infections with terminal investment. Female fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, have higher egg-to adult viability and lower survival when exposed to low-dose or sexually transmitted infections of an endemic fungus, Aspergillus austwickii. We identify Turandot C (TotC), a humoral stress response gene in insects, as the first non-immunological regulator of fecundity compensation. Strikingly, TotC-mediated fecundity compensation imposes negligible lifetime fitness costs, whereas expression of the canonical immune gene Dorsal-related immunity factor (Dif) triggers reproductively costly antagonistic pleiotropy. Contrary to foundational ecological theory, we show that terminal investment arises from immediate survival-reproduction tradeoffs, not truncated reproductive potential. Our findings reveal that adaptive evolution of innate immunity is constrained by classical fitness trade-offs in response to ubiquitous low-dose infections, which permits the evolution of mechanisms in which the host strategically surrenders to the pathogen. Our study refines how we conceptualise host-pathogen evolutionary conflicts and underscores a need to understand how immunosuppression evolves in hosts under ecologically prevalent low-dose infections. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.
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Brett Hodnett

If #civilization began again from scratch, what kinds of societies would evolve next time? #Communal, #capitalist. #theocratic, #meritocratic, #secular, #egalitarian, #exploitive? Societies are usually a combination of these types, but do they always combine as we expect them to? Are our choices about the type of #society we create completely up to us, or are we constrained by the environment and circumstance? Tomorrow is the last day I’ll be giving away my novel HUMAN to FediHumans. Visit bretthodnett.com/FreeHUMAN.htm and use the code ‘fedihuman’ to get your free EPUB!

bretthodnett.comHUMANA remarkable exploration of family, society, and what makes us human, HUMAN will take you from the post-apocalyptic world of the near future, to the two very different societies that emerge 15 million years later, where those few surviving individuals have evolved to become something that we might not fully recognize as human.
#HUMAN#WhatToRead#BookBlog
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