this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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Adaptive here means whether necrophilia occurs in order to still produce offspring, i.e. it's 'conscious' (I use that term veeeery loosely here) or if it occurs just because the animals don't recognize that the partner is dead.
I remember a paper about a frog species (not sure if it was the one from the meme) where the males participated in necrophilia, but they basically tried to squeeze eggs out of anything they grabbed. Living female, dead female, stone, sponge. All the same.
The Wikipedia article for these little monsters describes the males aggressively fighting over females mid-mating, to the point of killing some as they attempt to tear them away from one another, and then squeezing the eggs out of their dead bodies to fertilize them... Gonna guess it's the same one.
Would it be accurate to say that an adaptive trait is one selected by some evolutionary pressure, while a non-adaptive trait is just coincidence?
How could you tell if this trait was just very broad in it's application, say just the instinct to squeeze things, verses something completely coincidental?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
As for the second part, I'm not sure how to answer. Squeezing the partner is without a doubt adaptive, but squeezing anything that is roughly the same shape is a byproduct with no (strong) evolutionary pressure. Now, the question is whether functional necrophilia is adaptive or just a byproduct is very difficult to answer, but I lean towards byproduct.