Hello, meet my current Fascination: Synalpheus regalis, the Eusocial Shrimp Queen with a whole ass GUNARM. She lives in a big symbiotic sponge(see fig. 1) with her many infertile adult children and their MASSIVE GUNARMS that are useful for both snappy, click based communication and to create cavitation bubbles which boil at the literal heat of the surface of the sun.
Recent studies show that the emergence of Eusociality in these shrimp seems to have been rapidly driven in a short window of time by a mysterious flurry of motherfuckin Transposon activity!? Fuck me if I don't even think I can begin to grasp the full implications of transposons being able to drive evolution on short time scales, let alone change the entire social/reproductive strategy for a whole species complex in like a handful of generations.
Seriously, typein: 'Synalpheus regalis "Transposons"' into Google Scholar if you need further convincing that the fundamental stuff of reality is information and not the matter it underlies. Its wack as all hell I tell you. Theres like 6 people studying these out of Columbia and I have a strange research crush them and their weird Jesuit friends in Seattle.
