Like many biologists I imagine, I was delighted with this story, about a species of ant in which a few ants, each night, make it their business to seal the nest from the outside. This means that the colony is safer but the ants left outside die.
While biology is not particle physics, with the existence of new particles predicted by theory, it should be possible to predict biological phenomena to some extent at least. Knowing that worker ants and other social insect workers are altruistic (bees dying when they sting; termites that literally explode to protect the colony), it would not have been hard to predict the existence of ants that sacrifice themselves by sealing the nest from the outside. A few minutes thought would have done it.
Similarly, lazy ants and male stuffing in wasps could have been predicted from first principles.
I am aware of at least one prediction from first biological principles, by the McMenamins, as part of their "hypersea" hypothesis:
' Yet another test would be to look for organisms that exploit Hypersea in ways allowed by the hypothesis but that are thus far unidentified. For example, just as marine animals have become terrestrial parasites, photosynthesizing algae or bacteria should also find an animal to be a fine aquatic habitat. Mark suggests that there are (or once were) terrestrial counterparts of the Ediacaran fauna, animals that survive by hosting photosynthesis. "Whenever I give a lecture on Hypersea," says Mark, "someone comes up to me and says, 'I think there's one out there, too, and I'm going to find it.'" Mark himself will hunt for fossils of such life-forms. "I want to go into the Appalachian Mountains and look for evidence of unusual hypermarine linkages in these kinds of organisms. Maybe my photosynthetic land animal is there." '
Not quite what McMenamin had in mind, but pretty close, is the case of the South American sloth, which has symbiotic photosynthetic bacteria in its fur:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloth
" In moist conditions, the fur hosts two species of symbiotic cyanobacteria, which provide camouflage[3][4]. The bacteria provide nutrients to the sloth when licked during grooming.[citation needed] Sloth fur is also host to algae; this algae colors the coat green and acts as camouflage.[3]Because of this algae, sloth fur is a small ecosystem of its own, hosting many species of non-parasitic insects.[5]. "
It seems likely that to be a terrestrial animal hosting photosynthetic symbionts one would have to stay still and spend a lot of time in the sun. The sloth's arboreal life and slothful ways would probably meet this requirement.
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