Evolutionary Synchronicity?

by | Apr 28, 2025 | Objective Science, The Lost Herald

The Sword-Billed Hummingbird

The Sword-billed Hummingbird is a native of the Andes. You find it in Peru, Colombia, Venezuala and Equador. Hummingbirds are remarkable among bird species – being able to fly backwards, possessing a heart that can beat 1200 times per minute and living entirely from the nectar that flowers provide. The Sword-billed Hummingbird is more remarkabel still. It has a bill that is astonishingly long – reaching to over 4 inches and often exceeding the length of its own body.

Its unique bill is the only mechanism that makes available the nectar reserves hidden deep within the exceptionally long corolla tubes of certain passionflowers (like Passiflora mixta) and species of Datura (Brugmansia section). No other bird or insect can reach the nectar in these flowers. The Sword-billed Hummingbird is their sole effective pollinator – and the flowers’ anthers and stigma are positioned perfectly to brush against the bird’s forehead as it feeds at the extreme base of the floral tube.

An Evolutionary Enigma

So how did these very different co-dependent species ever evolve? If ever the flowers existed without the  hummingbird, they wouild never be fertilized and thus the plants woudl soon cease to exist. The Sword-billed Hummingbird could easily feed on other flowers, but why did it develop such an extraordinarily long beak. It would be unnecessary. And incidentally, this is not a one-off. There is also the Sicklebill Hummingbird bird whose dramatically curved bill is engineered perfectly for the strongly curved corollas of certain flowers within the genera Centropogon and Heliconia. No other hummingbirds or insects can fertilize these flowers either.

Of course Nature is awash with symbiotic relationships, but exclusive symbiosis is rare. Nevertheless it is more frequent than you’d imagine. Consider these examples:

Corals
In the sunlit waters of tropical oceans we encounter the partnership between reef-building corals and dinoflagellate algae known as zooxanthellae. Corals are animals, tiny polyps related to jellyfish, that build calcium carbonate skeletons that collectively form coral reefs. Zooxanthellae are single-celled algae that live within the coral’s tissues. The coral provides the algae with a protected environment, stable positioning for sunlight access, and essential nutrients like carbon dioxide and nitrogenous waste. In return, the algae perform photosynthesis, harnessing sunlight to produce energy-rich sugars and oxygen, up to 90% of which is donates to its coral  host.
Fig Trees and Fig Wasps

The fig tree is polinated exclusively by fig wasps (family Agaonidae). Figs have a unique reproductive structure called a syconium – what we commonly think of as the fruit is actually an enclosed inflorescence containing hundreds of tiny flowers lining its inner surface. These flowers cannot be pollinated by wind or typical pollinators; they rely exclusively on tiny fig wasps. A pregnant female wasp, carrying pollen from the fig where she hatched, enters a receptive syconium through a small opening, often losing her wings and antennae in the process. Inside, she pollinates the female flowers as she moves around and lays her eggs in some of them, effectively sacrificing those ovules to become nurseries for her offspring. The wasp then dies. Her larvae develop within galls formed by the parasitized flowers, feeding on the fig tissue. Male wasps hatch first, mate with the females while still inside their galls, and then chew exit tunnels for the females before dying. The newly emerged, pregnant females collect pollen from the mature male flowers within the syconium before exiting through the tunnels carved by the males, flying off to find another receptive fig tree of the same species to repeat the cycle. To make it more remarkable, this relationship is almost always species-specific: one fig species relies on one specific wasp species for pollination, and that wasp can only reproduce within the syconia of its partner fig. Neither can complete its life cycle without the other.

Giant Tube Worms and their MIcrobiome

Giant Tube Worms (Riftia pachyptila) live in total darkness in the environs of deep-sea hydrothermal vents, in the charming company of toxic chemicals. These are bizarre creatures. They have no alimentary canal – no mouth or gut or anus. What they have instead is an internal organ called a trophosome – which you can think of as a chemical laboratory. The trophosome is packed with billions of chemosynthetic bacteria. The worm will appear bright red if you shine a light on it, because it is rich in specialized hemoglobin. It absorbs oxygen, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide from the vent fluids and convey them to the bacteria. The bacteria then uses the chemical energy created by oxidizing hydrogen sulfide to convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds, nourishing both themselves and their host worm. The bacteria need the worm to feed them food and the worm needs the bacteria to digest it. They were made for each other.

Other Such Symbiotes

There are other examples of these exclusive relationships. The Hawaiian bobtail squid has a cosy bioluminescent relationship with V. fischeri bacteria which help it light up the dark depths of the ocean. Leaf-cutter ants farm fungi.They make a kind of soil from the leaves they cut and grow fungi in that soil in vast underground gardens. The fungus digests the cellulose in the leaves, which the ants cannot digest, converting it into nutrient-rich structures called gongylidia, which are the ants’ primary food source. This fungus is not found growing wild; it exists only within these ant colonies.

And then there’s lichen, which are not a single species as you may have thought, but a rather intimate symbiosis between a fungus (the mycobiont, usually an Ascomycete) and one or more photosynthetic partners (the photobiont, typically green algae or cyanobacteria). The fungus provides the structural framework, anchoring the lichen and protecting the photobiont from harsh environmental conditions like desiccation and excessive UV radiation. It also absorbs water and minerals from the substrate or atmosphere. The photobiont, nestled within the fungal matrix, performs photosynthesis, providing the fungus with essential carbohydrates.
And that’s not the whole story by any means. Indeed there are probably many species in exclusive symbiotic relationships that have not yet been noticed.

What We Are Inclined to Believe

Either Mother Nature operates with impossibly convenient but entirely random synchronicity or it lives and dies by the Trogoautoegocrat. It creates species to fill gaps. How it does so may be a mystery, but how do you explain any of these exclusive relationships without such an assertion.
The existence of hummingbirds themselves is remarkable. Mother Nature got the idea that it would be clever to use birds as pollinators, so it designed such birds and let them loose. But it did so only in the Americas.
Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and even New Zealand – no humming birds for you!