Evolving the Wow! Factor
March 25, 2008, 11:33 pm
Bio Babe Blog ;-) Doc
(Being the third part of an occasional series about mutations.)
Here are two pieces of bizarre natural history:
One. The crab spider Thomisus onustus. Some individuals are a most unspiderly color: they are hot pink. This allows them to hide in hot pink flowers — and ambush unwary bees. Other individuals are yellow, and hide in yellow flowers. Even more surprising, their colors are not fixed: move a pink spider to a yellow flower, and she can change her color to match.
Two. In the center of the Atacama desert in northern Chile, it rains less than five millimeters (less than quarter of an inch) a year, yet there are bacteria living inside quartz pebbles. Like plants, these bacteria make energy from sunlight. (The quartz is translucent, so it lets in some light, but at the same time, shields the organisms from the worst of the ultraviolet radiation.)
I mention these oddities because this week, I want to resume my obsession with mutations, and look explicitly at a type that I’ve so far mentioned only in passing: beneficial mutations.
[snip]
judson.blogs.nytimes.com
About Olivia Judson
Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist, is the author of “Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex,” which was made into a three-part television program. Ms. Judson has been a reporter for The Economist and has written for a number of other publications, including Nature, The Financial Times, The Atlantic and Natural History. She is a research fellow in biology at Imperial College London. |
