Ticks just repeatedly break my intuitions. How does something that small and R-selected have a 2-year-long lifecycle?
Oh goodness yes, fungi. Two-nuclei sexual stages startled me when I first learned of it. It’s a highly-diverse and successful clade, filling in an array of niches all across the specialist/generalist spectrum, and ranging anywhere from unicellular to syncytial to organisms the size of a city. Plus, many of them seem to manifest that evolutionary pseudo-”inventiveness” that I usually associate with bacteria.
Ticks just repeatedly break my intuitions. How does something that small and R-selected have a 2-year-long lifecycle?
Oh goodness yes, fungi. Two-nuclei sexual stages startled me when I first learned of it. It’s a highly-diverse and successful clade, filling in an array of niches all across the specialist/generalist spectrum, and ranging anywhere from unicellular to syncytial to organisms the size of a city. Plus, many of them seem to manifest that evolutionary pseudo-”inventiveness” that I usually associate with bacteria.
Pseudo-”inventiveness”?