#help--

🍒 ooc. staring down the barrel of over 100 tags to change and then replace on nearly 1300 posts (not to mention stuff that's in the paused queue,,,) got me seriously considering actually writing to put it off. also got me considering just making a new blog (this is forbidden).

It's easy to interpret animals evolving into niches as like. Finding premade holes made just for them. But that isn't accurate. It's like saying an animal is in a burrow it evolved to fit — no, it ripped the ground out to make a hole shaped in its image. They alter the ecological landscape, as part of that landscape. The niche doesn't "exist" until the animal in question evolves into it. Like... Parasites don't evolve to parasitize specific species because THOSE SPECIFIC SPECIES had an available niche, some weakness or special meat others didn't; it's more like a lot of Chance. Things don't evolve x way because they're like water flowing into every available predetermined crevice basically. They evolve because they want to replicate their genes. If they are ABLE to survive and reproduce, they will, even with some stupid limitation like needing to parasitize a different specific parasitoid wasp or whatever because their parents were parasites but there are other parasites competing for the same resources and you happen to have some mutation that allows you to or drives you to target the competitors as the resource instead... It's not perfect, even though it can become incredibly precise when it comes to efficiency and instinct and adaptations to said niche, and so on. It's just what worked. And what didn't work, was culled