Maybe a little cruel but I'd be interested in some sort of study where a large number of issus' are placed in an environment with a couple of predators.
Repeat this with young and adult versions and see if/how much the gear system (adults don't have it) improves the odds of surviving attacks.
What you would be testing is how much of an advantage the young have over the adults. I find it extremely unlikely that the gears are the only difference.
Yes and the gears would be hard to isolate as the lone cause (adults have more experience fighting prey etc.) so maybe you'd have to genetically engineer two groups one with gears and one without.
Either way the hypothesis they gave as to why the gears are eventually mutated away makes sense but has me wondering why they don't keep replacing them instead of settling on living without them.
Thus I'd like to quantify the edge said gears provide as a starting point for the investigation :)
Repeat this with young and adult versions and see if/how much the gear system (adults don't have it) improves the odds of surviving attacks.