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takyon writes:

Biologists sometimes use the phrase "arms race" to describe an evolutionary tug-of-war, but it's rarely this literal. Microbes called dinoflagellates [...] have developed intricate weapons—including a microscopic version of a Gatling gun—to harpoon their dinners, a new study shows. Scientists have known about these harpoons for decades, and some have guessed that the weapons stem from the same source as the ones wielded by jellyfish and other cnidarians. An analysis of the genes and proteins involved with weapon construction, however, shows that dinoflagellates and cnidarians use different proteins to manufacture their weapons—meaning they arrived at similar solutions through separate evolutionary paths, researchers report today in Science Advances.

Microbial arms race: Ballistic "nematocysts" in dinoflagellates represent a new extreme in organelle complexity (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1602552) (DX)

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