One of the joys of cool students (who eventually turn into cool alums) is they send you pointers to crazy weird stuff they find on-line. Like photos of carrion beetles!
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

OK, so the photo itself probably doesn’t wow you (unless you’re another carrion beetle), but the write up<\/a> on this little critter is pretty cool. The real kicker, though, is the follow-up post and photo<\/a>.<\/p>\n

All those little red guys are mites that hitch a ride on the underside of the beetle, and you might reasonably wonder why the beetle tolerates them (esp. in such numbers).<\/p>\n

\n<\/a><\/p>\n

Because they eat fly eggs and maggots which present a real threat to the carrion beetles’ wee ones. Because the flies, well, fly, they can get to the dead bodies faster than the beetles typically can, and their maggots can strip a little mouse corpse before the carrion beetle couple can get their brood up and running. So the beetles are quite happy to bring along a gaggle of mites, who then clear out any fly bits without bothering the beetles or their offspring.<\/p>\n

A rockin’ example of symbiosis if I ever saw one. Tip o’ the cap to MJ for the pointers, and to insectpod.com<\/a> for the photos and explanation of what’s going on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the joys of cool students (who eventually turn into cool alums) is they send you pointers to crazy weird stuff they find on-line. Like photos of carrion beetles! OK, so the photo itself probably doesn’t wow you (unless you’re another carrion beetle), but the write up on this little critter is pretty cool. … Continue reading “Evolution is just too<\/em> cool!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,20,15],"tags":[66,79,80],"class_list":["post-689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-photography","category-science","tag-evolution","tag-insects","tag-symbiosis"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p90sy-b7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":794,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2008\/02\/15\/darwin-dinosaurs-and-flesh-eating-beetles\/","url_meta":{"origin":689,"position":0},"title":"Darwin, dinosaurs, and flesh-eating beetles!","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"15 Feb 08","format":false,"excerpt":"I realize that I'm fashionably late for Darwin Day (12 Feb), but I offer cool-scary dinosaur skeletons and flesh-eating beetles in apology! We were in London Friday to see the Kildegaards who (a) are friends of ours from Morris, (b) are living in Denmark this year on sabbatical, and (c)\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":517,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2007\/03\/19\/and-the-hits-just-keep-on-coming\/","url_meta":{"origin":689,"position":1},"title":"And the hits just keep on coming!","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"19 Mar 07","format":false,"excerpt":"More favorites - 14 March 2007, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent. 36 more wonderful images from the happy land of Flickr :-). 1. My Gift, 2. seaside chaos, 3. reflection of winter, 4. Tiki, embracing his sphynxy bat heritage by hanging upside down from his jungle gym, 5. Rockies,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Photography"","block_context":{"text":"Photography","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/photography\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":588,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2007\/06\/24\/evolving-buildable-lego-structures\/","url_meta":{"origin":689,"position":2},"title":"Evolving buildable Lego structures","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"24 Jun 07","format":false,"excerpt":"More cool work out of Jordan Pollack's lab at Brandeis. They've build a nice force simulator and design system for Legos called EvoCAD that lets you evolve Lego structures that satisfy various conditions. Pablo Funes, who recently finished his PhD, used this to evolve spans of over 2 meters, tree-like\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":236,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/09\/19\/autechres-remix-of-tortoises-adverse-camber-is-cool\/","url_meta":{"origin":689,"position":3},"title":"Autechre’s remix of Tortoise’s “Adverse Camber” is cool","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"19 Sep 05","format":false,"excerpt":"Just caught Autechre's remix \"Adverse Camber\" on the 24 July 2005 Brainwashed podcast (yeah, I'm a lot of behind) and it's really cool. This is based on Tortoise's song \"Ten-Day Interval\" from their album TNT. It's long and atmospheric, but rhythmically really interesting and not dull or repetitious. It would\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Music"","block_context":{"text":"Music","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/music\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":37,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/01\/20\/a-potentially-cool-way-to-see-your-music\/","url_meta":{"origin":689,"position":4},"title":"A potentially cool way to see your music","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"20 Jan 05","format":false,"excerpt":"Levi (KUMM's music director) pointed me at musicmobs.com, and it looks like it could be pretty cool. There are two main ways to use it. First, you can just go to their web site, enter three bands, and get a list of other bands that you might be interested in.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":311,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2006\/02\/06\/daaaagstuuuuuhl\/","url_meta":{"origin":689,"position":5},"title":"Daaaagstuuuuuhl!","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"6 Feb 06","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm happy ensconced once again at the Schloss Dagstuhl International Conference Research Center for Computer Science in Germany for a week, and it's swell. The short version is that Dagstuhl is a 1700's manor house converted into a dedicated CSci research facility. They run a series of weekly workshops on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}