Extending her initial studies of social wasps, Mary Jane West-Eberhard has spent her career probing the evolutionary relationship between social behavior and developmental flexibility.
A handful of new studies moves the needle toward a consensus on the long-disputed question of whether insect wings evolved from legs or from the body wall, but the devil is in the details.
Hydra vulgaris constantly replenish the cells in their heads and grow new ones to reproduce asexually. But gene expression analyses reveal that regenerating a head after an injury is a very different process.
From detecting gravity and the Earth’s magnetic field to feeling heat and the movement of water around them, animals can do more than just see, smell, touch, taste, and hear.