Animals keep evolving into anteaters. Could this be the future of humanity? | Helen Pilcher
WHo doesn’t like an antiate? I mean, apart from ants, of course. With their long muzzle and even longer sticky languages, they throw themselves by folding, by crushing insects like milkshakes. They have a beautiful bushy tail, which they wrap around the night like a blanket. And these are excellent parents. Giant mothers allow their young people to hang on their backs, in Rucksack style, for periods of up to a year.
Indeed, the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí was so caught with the giant anthill that he once took it out in the streets of Paris. And before asking, no, it was not a dream of cheese. There is photographic evidence.
As if that was not enough, a recent study published in the Evolution journal revealed that mammals have evolved into anti-Fourners not once, not twice, but 12 times since the disappearance of dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. Antiares seem to be a recurring trend. The conclusion prompted the main study of the study, Thomas Vida from the University of Bonn, to say to science Magazine: “Things continue to become foutres, in one way or another.” What raises the question: will humans one day follow the step?
By “things”, Vida means mammals, and by “anti-anti-warranty”, it includes the four species of antics in Central and South America, the Pangolins and the Aardvarks of Africa and Asia, and the Echidnas of Australia. Different animals, on different continents, which all practice myrmecophagy, also known as termites consumption and ants. If you were adorned with young children, you would call them difficult eaters. If you were an evolving biologist, however, you emphasize that they are not deliberately difficult. Instead, they have evolved to fill a very special ecological niche.
This niche is provided by the vast world population of ants and termites, some 15,000 species, whose collective biomass is more than 10 times higher than that of all Wild mammals. At least a dozen times in the history of evolution, mammals have decided that if you cannot beat them, eat them and start consuming the crunchy delicacy.
Such an abundant food source can act as what biologists call “selective pressure”. The characteristics that allowed animals to eat more ants and termites – and therefore better survive – are more likely to be transmitted. During millions of years, animals of the three large groups in the life of mammals, including marsupials and laying monotremes, have evolved to have long and sticky languages, reduced or missing teeth and strong previous limbs to relax in insect nests.
It is a powerful example of convergent evolution, the phenomenon by which different species, in different places or era, evolve independently of similar characteristics. Faced with the same problem – How to eat these ants? – They all arrived at a similar solution. So, although they are not closely linked, they have features which are superficially similar.
Convergent evolution is the way in which echolocation (the ability to determine the location of objects using thoughtful sound) has evolved separately in bats and dolphins, the eyes similar to the camera have evolved in octopuses and vertebrates, and the opposable figures have evolved in primates, koalas and chameleons. The propelled flight has evolved independently at least four times – in birds, bats, pterosaurs and insects – and the production of venom more than 100 times, while crustaceans have evolved the classic Crab body plan at least five times. Known as the cancelization, he generated memes of abundance.
The evolutionary biologist Simon Conway Morris used convergent evolution to affirm that evolution is both deterministic and predictable. Look for the cassette of life, replay again and similar life forms would evolve, he said.
This means that in theory, with enough time (several tens of millions of years), the appearance and retention of the required genetic mutations and, critically, the even Selective pressures that have shaped the emergence of former ants, some mammals – including perhaps us – could Evolve gummies and sticky languages. Forget the history books, it is the cooking books that would be rewritten.
Only there is a fly in the ointment. We are wrong to presume that because myrmecophagy has evolved several times, it is the ultimate in a scalable tree. There are, after all, many more mammals that have not evolved into anti-Aiguilles than what started to enter the mounds of termites. The fact that the converging evolution occurs does not necessarily make the default path.
In addition, the evolution has a way to pull the carpet. It can Be predictable, but it can also be eccentric and erratic. In his 1989 book, Wonderful Life, another Titan of Evolutionary Biology, Stephen Jay Gould, pleaded for the importance of random events. These can be anything, thunderbolt to the impacts of asteroids: any unforeseen occurrence which derails the trajectory of evolution and sends it along a different path. In other words, moments of “sliding doors” that have influenced evolution for as long as there is life on earth.
So, it is not because things have continued to “evolve towards foutres” in the past that history will repeat itself. Which is a shame. Anti-aircraft and warnings generally do not eat all ants or termites in a nest, but leave some so that the colony can be rebuilt. This makes it the quintessence of lasting life. If we cannot evolve in them, we can at least learn from them.
