Whether nectar-sucking butterflies or blood-sucking mosquitoes – the ingestion of liquid food has long been known for many insects and other arthropods. A research team now shows that millipedes also use a sucking pump to ingest liquid food. A sucking pump has thus evolved independently in different groups of organisms over several 100 million years. In the process, astonishingly similar biomechanical solutions for ingesting liquid food have evolved in widely distant animal groups.
Click here for original story, Independent evolution of a complex sucking pump in arthropods
Source: ScienceDaily