The evolution of insect swarms from XNUMX million years ago

Chapter 25 Conjecture about origin

The second-generation soldier group only lost one. If the second wave came with a straight horned stone, it would still be able to fight. But if there are two adult helicotites, the situation is different.

The one-meter-long soldier can kill a nearly nine-meter-long tentacle beast. This is based on the fact that its tentacles have limited flexibility. If you want to cause effective controlled damage, you can only use ten tentacles to attack one target at the same time. Sacrifice one soldier to occupy the tentacles of the straight spiral stone, so that other soldiers can take advantage of the opportunity to deal damage.

The appearance of two straight spiral horn stones means that when the tentacles of one horn stone wrap around a soldier to output, the other horn stone can use its tentacles to drive away other approaching soldiers at the same time.

When the first corner stone eliminates the soldiers and frees up its tentacles, the second corner stone attacks the soldiers while the first corner stone covers them. In this cycle, they can effectively cover each other's weaknesses and defeat the soldiers. One hit to kill.

Although he didn't know if these corner stones had enough intelligence to come up with such a tactic, Lin Yi was not willing to take the risk.

With a thought, Bing Hao raised the scorpion's tail, and clamped its earwig-like tail clip on one of the tentacles of the corpse of the previously killed Zhihejiushi. Between the limbs, two pairs of paddling feet were swinging to evacuate the scene.

The conical shell of the right helical stone stabbed like a lance with the help of the water jet propulsion system, but the swarm of soldiers had already dispersed and hid among the coral reefs.

The speed and maneuverability brought by the two pairs of paddling feet are far superior to those of the previous generation of soldiers, allowing them to easily avoid the charge of the straight spiral stone.

The swarm of soldiers entered the coral reef again, and one of them still had a straight spiral horn stone tentacle sandwiched between its sickle limbs.

Lin Yi skillfully stuffed it into the mother's nest, and then controlled the soldier to poke its head out from the edge of the coral reef. He used a pair of compound eyes to observe the two adult heliconias still swimming above, and fell into deep thought.

The appearance of these two adult helical stones completely confirmed Lin Yi's previous guesses. Orthogonite is a highly social creature.

This was almost unbelievable in this era, and no cephalopod in later generations had such a complex social nature. However, it reminded Lin Yi of another possibility.

The gregarious, social Cornerstone is incompatible with the times. But Lin Yi himself is even more out of tune with the times!

In later generations, horseshoe crabs and even the entire chelicerate subphylum did not evolve social creatures, but Lin Yi's nest group was born, a eusocial group with the mother nest as the core.

So, is it possible that the same is true for the Orthogonite, with a mother nest as the core, and all individuals born from the mother nest share a hive mind?

In this way, the characteristics of Orthospermum that are different from any other types of hornstones that have been discovered later can also be explained by the gene editing ability of the mother nest.

At the same time, the care of the young and the highly social nature of killing one and attracting two make sense.

The original mother nest was most likely the pupa of a wild individual feather-winged horseshoe crab. It was only after the first individual feather-winged horseshoe crab was produced that Lin Yi's consciousness woke up and took over the body.

This means that Lin Yi knows nothing about the individual feather-winged horseshoe crab that emerged from scratch and turned into a mother nest inexplicably. He can only speculate that it "has undergone some unknown mutation."

However, genetic mutations are disordered and chaotic. The probability of mutating a benign trait is about the same as extracting an SSR alone. A good trait often takes a long time to evolve over generations. Lin Yi did not think that such a mutation with such a clear purpose and extremely complex results could occur naturally.

It is more like the product of targeted editing, just like what was done to the gene sequence of the horseshoe crab using the gene editing capabilities of the mother nest.

However, in this era, how is the genetic sequence of a wild horseshoe crab edited when there is no mother nest? After thinking about it, Lin Yi only thought of one possibility.

……

Later studies have shown that 4.66 million years ago during the Darivian period of the Middle Ordovician, an asteroid with a diameter of about 150km collided with another asteroid and fragmented, throwing a large number of small fragments towards the earth. This is known as the Middle Ordovician in history. Meteor incident.

It was after this event that the Ordovician radiation, the second large-scale species evolution event in the history of life on earth after the Cambrian explosion, began.

If the long history of biological evolution is compared to a big tree, then the Cambrian explosion gave the tree branches, while the Ordovician radiation filled the bare branches of the big tree with twigs and leaves. . Taxa at the family or genus level began to radiate on a large scale.

The explanation given by later studies is that the Middle Ordovician meteor event brought some nutrients from the universe to the earth, and the dust raised at the same time began to divide the temperature zones, which greatly enriched the diversity of species.

However, the emergence of mother nests and nest colonies that have evolved far beyond their times forced Lin Yi to re-examine the incident.

The existence of a mother nest is not something that can be achieved by the current level of evolution of living things on earth. Rather, not long ago - of course, relative to the long geological era - there was an event where a large number of celestial debris fell into the earth's atmosphere, and at the same time It triggered a large-scale evolution of life on earth, which he couldn't help but think about.

Among the coral reefs, Bing Hao's well-developed compound eyes looked upward, as if his eyes were penetrating through layers of water waves, and then through the atmosphere, looking straight up to the sky.

If the unknown thing that caused the directional mutation of the horseshoe crab gene and acquired the ability to pupate into a mother nest really came from the asteroid that disintegrated due to the impact, then after it dispersed and fell into the earth's atmosphere, it must have affected more than just that one animal. Horseshoe crab.

As the most dominant and diverse species in the Ordovician, hornstones, it is only natural that an individual comes into contact with unknown things falling from the sky and transforms into a mother nest, creating a nest with hornstones as the main species.

……

While thinking, on the periphery, two straight helical stones spurted out water from the funnel. Their huge bodies approached the edge of the coral reef. Their narrow pupils looked through the gaps in the outer coral reef at the mother nest and the soldiers swimming beside it. Their huge eyeballs and Binghao was born out of the compound eyes of the feather-winged horseshoe crab facing each other, like a huge sea monster in the abyss looking at its panicked prey through the portholes of a sunken ship.

At the same time, more larvae of the larvae Zhihejiushi also came forward, swimming through the gaps between the rocks, and tentatively swam towards the soldiers and their mother's nest.

If these helical stones are really individuals from another nest group, then there is a high probability that these larvae are not without fighting ability.

Faced with the opponent's possible temptation, Lin Yi controlled the soldiers to open their sickle limbs, and the clusters of blade spines emerged as the sickle limbs unfolded, killing the larvae of the Orthospermum swimming towards it.

(End of this chapter)