“Ticks” is a diverse group, but I agree they are strange. Like the occasional males in parthenogenetic species? I mean, why do it?..
And my own favorite, if we are permitted to name large groups (can’t say “taxa” here) will be, of course, Fungi Imperfecti. I know it’s a cop out, though, in many senses relative to the OP.
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” is a diverse group, but I agree they are strange. Like the occasional males in parthenogenetic species? I mean, why do it?..
And my own favorite, if we are permitted to name large groups (can’t say “taxa” here) will be, of course, Fungi Imperfecti. I know it’s a cop out, though, in many senses relative to the OP.
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”?