Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Absence of wings in non-pterygote insects and other organisms is a complementary symplesiomorphy that unites no group (for example, absence of wings provides no evidence of common ancestry of silverfish, spiders and annelid worms). On the other hand, absence (or secondary loss) of wings is a synapomorphy for fleas.
Silk: spiders, silk moths, larval caddis flies, and the weaver ant all produce silken threads. [145] The praying mantis body type – raptorial forelimb, prehensile neck, and extraordinary snatching speed - has evolved not only in mantises but also independently in neuropteran insects Mantispidae. [146]
Convergent evolution of many groups of insects led from original biting-chewing mouthparts to different, more specialised, derived function types. These include, for example, the proboscis of flower-visiting insects such as bees and flower beetles , [ 52 ] [ 53 ] [ 54 ] or the biting-sucking mouthparts of blood-sucking insects such as fleas and ...
The fibers are pulled out by the calamistrum, a comblike set of bristles on the jointed tip of the cribellum, and combined into a composite woolly thread that is very effective in snagging the bristles of insects. The earliest spiders had cribella, which produced the first silk capable of capturing insects, before spiders developed silk coated ...
All of these terms are by definition relative, in that a trait can be a plesiomorphy in one context and an apomorphy in another, e.g. having a backbone is plesiomorphic between birds and mammals, but is apomorphic between them and insects.
This symbiotic relationship is even more paramount in evolution considering that more than 2/3 of flowering plants are insect pollinated. [13] Insects, particularly mosquitoes and flies, are also vectors of many pathogens that may even have been responsible for the decimation or extinction of some mammalian species. [14]
By the Jurassic period, the sophisticated aerial webs of the orb-weaver spiders had already developed to take advantage of the rapidly diversifying groups of insects. A spider web preserved in amber, thought to be 110 million years old, shows evidence of a perfect "orb" web, the most famous, circular kind one thinks of when imagining spider webs.
Transfers of endosymbiont genes involved in nutrition pathways beneficiary to the insect host have been shown to occur preferentially if the donor and recipient lineages share the same host. [ 143 ] [ 144 ] [ 145 ] This is also the case in insects with bacterial symbionts providing defensive protein [ 146 ] or in obligate leaf nodule bacterial ...