Gooty Sapphire Ornamental Tarantula - in a surprise to no one it’s critically endangered.
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That is simultaneously beautiful and horrifying!
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Not by me it’s not, I’d run a mile 
Where does it live, just so I know never to go there?
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That’s beautiful! I realise nature doesn’t do ugly; however if all spiders were this beautiful, they wouldn’t have such bad PR! 
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Bengal Tiger, beautiful creature. But beauty here is more than skin deep, it’s evolutionary. I always wondered how an orange predator had any success in the natural environment. Turns out its main prey, deer, only have two colour receptors and cant see red. They see orange as green. Mammals cant produce a green pigment. Therefore over evolutionary time, a camouflage based on orange gives the advantage over other colours. Mind, still only a 10% hunt success rate, but it’s enough.
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Stuff like that I just can’t comprehend. How did the tiger know a deer can only see in two colours?
I’m baffled 
Have you ever encountered the naked mole rat?
It doesn’t, that’s the mind fuck. Those that developed by genetic mutation, an orange pigment gained an evolutionary advantage mover time, I think that’s the general theory.
They do fucking hate monkeys though. They do see all coulors and if near the Deer will sound the alarm, bastards!
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It doesn’t - but evolutionary advantage doesn’t care whether the creature knows it has that advantage
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It didn’t. The ones that thrived were probably a lighter brown then more orange as those evolved. You do wonder why the deer haven’t evolved more sophisticated eyes though!
If the required mutation never happens, tough shit!
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They will have acquired other sensory enhancements in the genetic arms race. Better hearing, movement perception, smell etc.
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I think there’s a chunk here that the Creationism lot never get their heads round. They seem to operate from a place that assumes / requires a degree of plan or intent or something like that to the evolutionary process, and it’s just not applicable.
Doesn’t monochromatic vision supposed to give an advantage in low light ?
I beg your pardon. Are you using some bizarre Welsh dialect today?
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Not enough spittle for it to be welsh
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The concept that people really struggle with - usually without realising - is time: there’s so much of it over evolutionary timescales that it’s effectively incomprehensible to our programmed-for-35-year-lifespans minds.
Evolutionary pathways are also rarely straight. For example coat colour in mammals can be controlled by a single gene (it isn’t often, but…), which can carry the encoding for multiple very different ‘options’, but that ‘ability’ generally doesn’t evolve independently in, say, big cats, wolves, hyaenas, mustelids, &c, but has been carried-over from a distant common ancestor - perhaps as far back as a tiny Late Jurassic shrew-like carnivore, 140 million years ago. Same gene, multiple different descendants. Generally, the more fundamental the characteristic, the further back in time it evolved, e.g. bilateral symmetry has its origins in the Precambrian, well over a billion years ago.
Acquiring that plasticity is the time-consuming bit; changing coat colour from, say, Lion savannah-brown, to Tiger jungle-stripey orange, can happen remarkably quickly (in a geological sense) - a few thousand years is enough to select one over the other between closely-related species. Problem is, that only works when there are large, widespread, genetically-diverse populations: on a human-infected planet that opportunity doesn’t exist, the populations are far too small and the gene pool inadequate: which is why zoos and wildlife reserves are probably not going to be enough, longer-term, for these species to survive.
That is the aspect of Darwin that was probably most shocking to the Victorians. In the context of a rose tinted idealised view of nature, the idea that most predators die of starvation and not many survive childhood is a big problem.
Probably early Cornish then…
It’s more that light receptor cells are not colour receptor cells, so if your eyesight favours night vision, it is usually colour vision-poor, the alternative is to have fuckhuge eyes, like raptors.
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