WARNING: Do not tell your fundamentalist/creationist friends this news unless you want to watch their heads explode from all the cognitive dissonance.
It seems that crickets, the noisy little buggers you hear at night throughout this great land of ours, have either been blessed with a genuine act of GOD, or once again have provided more evidence that Darwin’s “theory” of evolution (as amended over time by biologists) just might accurately describe how species change over time. Specifically, crickets in two separate places have either been told to “shut it” by God (hey miracles could happen I suppose, but crickets?), or they evolved to no longer make a joyful noise unto the Lord to protect themselves from predators. From the BBC News online:
To hide themselves from deadly flies, crickets on two Hawaiian islands have evolved an inability to sing.
Ten years ago, two years apart, males appeared on Kauai and Oahu with altered wings, which they would normally rub together to chirp and attract females.
You see, the recent arrival of a particular fly species from North America proved deadly to the crickets on these Hawaiian islands. The flies were exceptionally good listeners. Able to pinpoint the location of the crickets by sound alone, the flies would drop in and lay baby maggots atop the male cricket’s body. Once those little maggots got to work, well, that was all she wrote for the poor male crickets. In about than a week, give or take a few days, the crickets were eaten out husks of their former selves. This obviously forced the crickets to adapt or die out. And “adapt” they did, in fairly quick fashion.
In less than 20 generations, a mutation that leaves males unable to sing spread to over 90% of the crickets on the island of Kauai. […]
Two years after the Kauai discovery in 2003, flatwing crickets were also found over 100km away on Oahu.
What’s even stranger (or not) is that these Hawaiian male crickets on these two islands were “silenced” as it were by two separate mutations according to a study published in the journal “Biology” (citation: S. Pascoal et al., “Rapid convergent evolution in wild crickets,” Current Biology, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2014.04.053, 2014). And apparently these mutations happened completely independently of one another:
The idea that the trait had evolved twice, at almost the same time, seemed far-fetched. “It still seems amazing to me,” Dr Bailey told BBC News.
The first clue was an observation that the mutant, silenced wings on the two islands had two different shapes. […]
[C]omparing a raft of other genetic markers between the two groups yielded convincing evidence that the two mutations had occurred independently.
Can’t wait to hear what explanation the Creationists have for God deciding to cause separate mutations to these Hawaiian crickets to achieve the same result: keeping them quiet. I suspect in this case, we won’t even hear the crickets in their response.
For more details about the Silence of the Hawaiian Crickets go here: Link.
