selfish genes

When researchers went to get a look at a cape cobra snake fight, it turned out to be one cobra swallowing another. They named the newly well-fed study animal NN011, otherwise “Hannibal.” Apparently, “Diner, meet Dinner!” is not an uncommon relationship among cape cobras so a study of the details ensued: Snake-eating, they found, was common among five of the six species studied, accounting for 13 to 43 percent of the cobras’ diets. Four per cent of the snake dinners eaten were of the same species as the diner. One researcher reasoned, In all the cannibalism events that the researchers witnessed themselves, both the eater and the eaten were males, leading them to suspect that this behavior may be a Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Genetics isn’t as important as once thought for the evolution of altruistic social behavior in some organisms, a new insight into a decade-long debate. This is the first empirical evidence that suggests social behavior in eusocial species — organisms that are highly organized, with divisions of infertile workers — is only mildly attributed to how related these organisms are to each other. In evolutionary biology, fitness refers to an organism’s reproductive success and propagation of its genes. When researchers at Hokkaido University studied the foraging and nesting behaviors of the eusocial species Lasioglossum baleicum, commonly known as the sweat bee, they found that the fitness was more a result of the bees’ cooperative behaviour than it was a Read More ›