How do symbiotic relationships develop between two different animal species over time?
In: Biology
My first ELI5 so bear with me.
Firstly, there are many different purposes for symbiotic relationships. These involve predation, Herbivory, mutualism, parasitism, and competition.
If you take the example of bees seeking pollen. This is a symbiotic relation as the bees get food and plants are able to reproduce.
To develop this relationship you have to think of how this benefits the plant. If the bee goes from a daisy to a weed, they will not spread the pollen from the daisy to the weed.
But! There are other pollinators. There are moths with extremely long tongues. But the plant can’t choose who picks up its pollen. Say there is a daisy flower with a really long flower. It takes a long tool to get to the pollen in the flower. So now, these moths with long tongues are the only things that can get to the pollen. So that moth now knows that if it goes to that flower, that it has a higher chance of getting pollen + food. So the plants that have longer flowers continue to reproduce, moths know that flowers that are longer have the food that they need and they start a “symbiotic” relationship.
I put symbiotic in quotes because there are so many examples of them, including caterpillars that eat sugary lollipops produced on the stems of some plants, that then make the caterpillars poop smell sweet, to attract wasps that come in to kill and eat the caterpillar.
It’s is all based on evolutionary traits that benefit a predator or prey. The new learned behavior changes that of another predator or prey and the cycle continues as one mutation out competes another.
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