Rove beetles are not ants, but their bodies look uncannily like ants; some have adopted ant-like behaviors such as grooming or participating in raids, and still others give off the same chemical signals that ants do. And across many millions of years, at least a dozen distinct lineages of these rove beetles have independently evolved what's known as convergent evolution--the ability to mimic to deceive ants to treat rove beetles as their own, enabling rove beetles to infiltrate ant colonies for food and sometimes even eat young ants.
(http://josecarilloforum.com/imgs/rove-beetles-evolution-1.png)
These findings were reported by Joseph Parker, an evolutionary biologist at the California Institute of Technology and a MacArthur grantee, who has spent his career investigating rove beetles and was able to construct their evolutionary trees that reveal multiple independent transitions from free-living to symbiotic lifestyles.
Parker says about rove beetles: “It’s very unusual that they independently evolved many different ant-like features over time. [These] provide a paradigm for understanding how new kinds of ecological relationships between species emerge during evolution.”
Read Deena Mousa's article "The Evolution of a Mimic" in the January 17, 2025 issue of the Nautilus website now! https://nautil.us/the-evolution-of-a-mimic-1182904/?utm_campaign=website&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nautilus-newsletter