NATURE'S REAL-LIFE VAMPIRES
Millions of years ago, sometime during the dinosaur era, ancient arthropods experimented with an unusual new diet: blood. Those ancestors of today’s mosquitoes, ticks and bedbugs were some of the first, but certainly not the last, to try haematophagy.
Though relatively rare as far as diets go, haematophagy - or blood-feeding - isn’t something that evolved once, or even in a small collection of closely-related animals. Haematophagy evolved independently at least 20 times in arthropods alone, as well as in a bunch of worms, some fish, and a few birds and mammals. Despite all this diversity in animal form, each coven of vampires had to tackle similar problems to refine their grisly lifestyle.
THE RED STUFF
A diet as specialised as blood, a renewable but not easily accessible resource, doesn’t appear out of nowhere. Mouthparts originally used for piercing or cutting other food, like plants, gave prototype blood-feeders a head start. Many were also fortunate to live in the right place, on and around potential hosts, as scavengers, parasites, or even predators. Supported by these
