Television nature programmes and scientific papers tend to celebrate the perfection of evolved traits. But the father of evolution through natural selection, Charles Darwin, warned that evolution would produce quirks and “blunders” that reflect a lineage’s history.
Our recent study from the Kruger National Park in South Africa shows how true this is. Our team of behavioural ecologists found that the behaviour of certain fig wasps, long considered textbook examples of precise adaptation, is far from perfect.
Previous research on fig wasps, but also other parasitoid wasps in general, has focused almost exclusively on design perfection. The aim of our work was to investigate a case where we expected to see “imperfections” due to necessary compromises and the legacy of history.
