Mastodawn

yo imagine if there were, like, normal plant-eating dairy cows, and sometimes they would have calves that looked and acted so much like human babies that people just assumed they were abandoned human babies and adopted them, except the baby-mimicking cows were vampires feeding on their adoptive siblings, and sometimes their offspring would be more vampire cow baby mimics but also sometimes just, like, normal baby cows, and people would just be like "huh, how did a calf get in here" and put it in the barn. and this probably came about back during a prehistoric age when, between the nuclear wars and the tsunamis and earthquakes and wildfires and whatnot, people periodically had to go live in bunkers and they took their cows in with them and the cows got hungry, but they still kind of hedged their bets, evolutionarily speaking, because it was possible they'd be able to go back to living above ground and eating fresh grass one day.

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neville park 21h ago

one morning in calving season, you open the door to see a bunch of babies in baskets on your doorstep. they're adorable and you instantly want to take them in and feed them and dress them in the kids' hand-me-downs. but you know damn well there ain't no one else of childbearing age within five kilometres. "Mary!" you yell. "Get the Geiger counter, the cows are goin' changeling again!" this ain't your first vampire cow rodeo.

#MicroFiction #TootFic

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neville park 21h ago

Anyway,

> We show that the two wingless morphs occurring during the root-dwelling phase of the life cycle of the aphid _Paracletus cimiciformis_ follow distinct strategies that entail disparate relationships with ants. On the one hand, the round morph exhibits the plant sap-sucking feeding behavior characteristic of aphids and establishes a typical mutualistic trophobiotic relationship with ants. On the other hand, aphids of the flat morph, although able to feed on plants, are brought inside the ant brood chamber where they are cared for by the ants. Our results show that the latter strategy is accomplished by flat morph aphids by mimicking ant larvae chemical signals and that, besides obtaining ant care, aphids in the brood chamber actively suck hemolymph from ant larvae.
>
> […] By being transported by the ants deep into their brood chambers, aphids of the flat morph would be safe from temperature extremes experienced by other root-dwelling aphids that stay closer to the roots to feed. We suggest that lack of access to plants in the brood chamber may have driven the evolution of the ability to use a different food resource (i.e., hemolymph of ant larvae), at least temporarily. The fact that flat morph aphids inside ant nests give rise, when harsh conditions are over, to four morphs representing life history strategies adapted to different temporal and spatial uncertainties…suggests that the flat morph is at the center of a diversified strategy for survival and recolonization of the aphid host plants.

A. Salazar, B. Fürstenau, C. Quero, N. Pérez-Hidalgo, P. Carazo, E. Font, & D. Martínez-Torres, Aggressive mimicry coexists with mutualism in an aphid, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 112 (4) 1101-1106, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1414061112 (2015).