This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine. Caroline Chaboo’s eyes light up when she talks about tortoise beetles. Like gems, they exist in myriad bright colors: shiny blue, red, orange, leaf green and transparent flecked with gold. They’re members of a group of 40,000 species of leaf beetles, the Chrysomelidae, one of the most species-rich branches of the vast beetle order, Coleoptera. “You have your weevils, longhorns, and leaf beetles,” she says.
Many of these genes code for enzymes that help to break down plant cell walls, allowing access to sugars stored in hard-to-digest compounds like cellulose, hemicellulose and pectin. “The lineages that have these genes were the ones that are so incredibly successful,” McKenna says. These genes were ingenious adaptations that turned indigestible plant parts into food.
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