Waiter, there's a spam in my insect

In an inadvertently, or perhaps deliberately, funny abstract, D. Osorio notes that there's a role for spam in insect evolution.

Spam and the evolution of the fly's eye.

Osorio D.

School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QG, UK.

The open rhabdoms of the fly's eye enhance absolute sensitivity but to avoid compromising spatial acuity they require precise optical geometry and neural connections. This neural superposition system evolved from the ancestral insect eye, which has fused rhabdoms. A recent paper by Zelhof and co-workers2 shows that the Drosophila gene spacemaker (spam) is necessary for development of open rhabdoms, and suggests that mutants revert to an ancestral state. Here I outline how open rhabdoms and neural superposition may have evolved via nocturnal intermediates, and discuss the implications for the role of spam in insect phylogeny. BioEssays 29: 111-115, 2007

This just cries out for a rebuttal paper entitled "Have you got any bugs without so much spam in them?"

Hat tip to Pete Dunkelberg.