Blog RU

Convergent evolution of eusociality and the seafloor

I wanted to write that it's technically more correct to consider the land not as the upper layers of water, but as a very high seabed. And I also wanted to say something about corals. I started searching for information on organisms that exist in shallow waters, where there's plenty of sunlight and the opportunity to colonize the bottom. It turned out that in the aquatic world, corals, hydrozoans, and ascidians can be considered conditionally eusocial. But with the caveat that each of them is literally a single organism, even though it looks like a colony of insects. That is, just as dolphins moved from land to water using crutches, mimicking fish features, bees are also terrestrial versions of seafloor organisms, even though they are not direct descendants of, say, ascidians. P.S. This is all very roughly speaking, regarding the idea of ​​establishing a foothold in a certain territory and thriving due to the size of an organism/colony. Water As an element, it's much more associated with freedom than land. Therefore, true eusociality, with all the dramatic aesthetics of dystopia, arose only on land. While water is the realm of individualists, and even the semblance of a colony is possible there in the form of a single organism, where all questions of freedom are removed. That's how coral lives, it likes it. No oppression. In fact, my post is about the desired world, where there is no society and it's much easier to run away/hide than to fight and enslave precisely the properties of the aquatic environment. There, the "slavery" options are mainly those of parasitic leeches. Return to monk? Or maybe return to fish? I still need to look for an opportunity to join the cult of Dagon and become a deep-sea dweller.