How does the rhino beetle’s gigantic horn not totally mess with its ability to fly?

Seriously , look at the sizing of the thing sticking out of that beetle ’s head , and that ’s not even the maximum size of it those things get to . All male rhino beetles have these jumbo horns grow out of their head as a means of showing off their intimate artistry to any distaff rhino mallet that might be around . Crazy , gawky anatomy like this is n’t strange … but the fact that these horns do n’t seem to pose any problems for their owners most decidedly is .

This all goes back to the idea of price in an evolutionary mother wit — when a species develops an ostentatious showing like this in social club for the males to up their chances of enticing a mate , there should be some trade - off somewhere . Large horns might make it gruelling for their owners to pilot , or it might ram them to eat a lot more , or something . But when research worker at the University of Montana set up out to key out just how the horn affect rhino beetles ’ ability to fell , they were appalled to discover that it really did n’t . Lead researcher Erin McCullough explained the answer tothe BBC , with a wonderfully frank opening description of these beetle :

“ chip in that males have a giant pitchfork of a horn sticking out of the head , I expected that flying would be inept and clumsy . quantify flight toll seemed like a sound place to start . I was not have a bun in the oven the horns to have such a lowly force on flight . Horns [ also ] do n’t appear costly in term of resource allocation craft - offs , immune costs or selection . So if there are costs associated with carrying and/or bring forth horn , it definitely is n’t obvious what these costs might be . ”

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