neotropicum
neotropicum infects the ant Cephalotes atratus, leading to dramatic changes in the infected ant's morphology and behavior. The infected ants abdomen turns red and is held raised up, which makes it resemble a fruit and increases the likelihood of the infected ant being eaten by birds . The birds transport the worms, which survive in their digestive systems until they are excreted; they are then eaten by, and infect new ants to complete the worms life cycle.78 Perhaps the most famous example of this type of behavior occurs in wasps of the family Ichneumonidae. Female wasps deposit their fertilized eggs into the bodies of various types of caterpillars. The wasp eggs hatch out and produce larvae which then feed on the living caterpillar, consuming it from the inside out. Charles Darwin, in a letter to the American naturalist Asa Gray, remarked There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Rather than presume that a supernatural creator was responsible for such apparently cruel behaviors, Darwin and others sought alternative, morally neutral naturalistic processes that could both generate biological diversity and explain biological behaviors. As the diversity of organisms became increasingly apparent and difficult to ignore, another broad and inescapable conclusion began to emerge from anatomical studies: many different organisms displayed remarkable structural similarities. For example, as naturalists characterized various types of animals, they found that they either had an internal skeleton the vertebrates or did not the invertebrates . Comparative studies revealed that there were often many similarities between quite different types of organisms. A classic work, published in 1555, compared the skeletons of a human and a bird, both vertebrates.79 While many bones have different shape and relative sizes, what was most striking is how many bones are at least superficially similar between the two organisms . This type of comparative anatomy revealed many similarities between apparently unrelated organisms. For example, the skeleton of the dugong a large aquatic mammal appears quite similar to that of the European mole, a small terrestrial mammal that tunnels underground on land. In fact, there are general skeletal similarities between all vertebrates. The closer we look, the more similarities we find. These similarities run deeper than the.