Social insects disobey evolutionary principles that say creatures invest in body maintenance or reproduction — not both. Scientists want to know how the creatures do it.
Millions of years of coevolution have given the insects a bag of tricks to escape their predators — from signal-jamming and decoys to acoustic camouflage
Fifty years ago, Geoff Parker’s pioneering scholarship on “sperm competition” in insects was broadly overlooked. Since those days, hundreds of studies in many animals have confirmed the importance of what he discovered while watching flies mate around cow pats.
Some spiders pair puny males with gigantic females, making mating both tricky and dangerous. Why and how such mismatches evolved remains curiously enigmatic.
Dozens of times over the eons, rove beetles have made complex, independent adaptations to live inside the nests of ants — the phenomenon of convergent evolution. Biologists want to know if this shows patterns at work in natural selection.
By engineering mutations into fruit flies, scientists reconstructed how the butterflies may have evolved resistance to the toxins found in milkweed, allowing their caterpillars to feast on the plant
Evolution made insect ears many times over, resulting in a dazzling variety of forms found in spots all over the body. Biologists are digging deep into some of those ears to figure out how and why they came to be.
COMIC: The feisty orange-black butterfly uses a toolbox of biological tricks to find its way down to Mexico for winter and flap north again in spring. Here’s how scientists figured out those tricks — and what they don’t yet understand.
