Evolutionary Arms Race: Butterfly vs. Ant

There's an evolutionary arms race going on between a rare species of butterfly and ants:

Maculinea alcon butterflies infect the nests of Myrmica ants by hatching caterpillars nearby, hoping that the caterpillars will be ‘adopted’ and cared for by ants that mistake them for their own young. The caterpillars achieve this by mimicking the surface chemistry of the ants. Getting this chemistry right is important: if an ant doesn’t recognize a caterpillar as one of its own it will eat it, says David Nash, a zoologist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

Successfully adopted caterpillars are bad for the ant colonies, as ants may neglect their own young in favour of the intruders. But the ants are fighting back. “The ant larvae seem to be evolving as a result of being parasitized,” says Nash. “It’s an ongoing evolutionary arms race.”

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080103/full/news.2007.405.html (Photo: David Nash) - via 3quarksdaily


This is great!

This is what people in general are doing in America:
Black women are all straightening their hair.
The rich people are all hiring hard-working Hispanics to raise their kids and clean their shite.
White folks are getting so lazy to have their own babies and/or for the sake of the vanity of their vaginas and penises that they're adopting thousands of poor kids from around the world, diluting their own descendancy, and then dumping them once they've outgrown their "cute-ness" phases.
So the Catholics are fighting back by paying off all the boys they buggered, yet still preaching to the mothers and women to keep on having kids to proliferate their race.

Same shite, really, nature is all about evolution: shite just happens.
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