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.
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
