MYRMECOS - Insect Photography - Insect Pictures. One-night stands make birds uncooperative. To cooperate or not to cooperate is a question that every breeding species has to answer.
From an evolutionary standpoint, breeding passes on half your genetic material, while your siblings will pass on a quarter of your genetic material. If life isn't too difficult, then it makes sense to do your own breeding and ignore your siblings—or, perhaps, try to outcompete them. But, if life is pretty hard—and lets face it, life is usually tough for most species—perhaps it makes sense in the long term to forgo having your own children and make sure that your relatives successfully raise as many children as possible. This behavioral adaptation is a key concept in evolutionary theory, but it only works if parents don't cheat. One consequence of this idea is that there should be a correlation between species that breed cooperatively and the amount of cheating that goes on.
Adult fly mimics ant larva. This is the kind of stuff I love to find in my inbox in the morning. I work on flies, and I’ve never seen or heard of these ones until Matthew Cobb posted about them in his email Z-letter this morning. Look at the creature in the top photo.