The Beaty Biodiversity Museum hosted the 6th annual “Bake a Cake for Darwin” contest on February 12. This year, we encouraged participants to bake a cake for Wallace as well. There were 9 wonderful entries, and over 60 hungry spectators.
The winning cake, entitled “A Hug Across the Wallace Line,” featured a pangolin and echidna, along with cinnamon and nutmeg. The cake came with the following description:
“In regions with distinct evolutionary histories, the same ecological niche may be occupied by two vastly different organisms. In southeast Asia, the pangolin is a termite predator through the Malay peninsula and western Indonesia. In Australia and Papua New Guinea the echidna is a specialist on termites. Despite being geographically close in modern times, these regions were isolated in the geologic past and the plants and animals that live there are distinct. Pangolins and echidnas, two unusual but unrelated mammals, thus evolved to have the same food source. Alfred Russel Wallace, a 19th-century contemporary of Charles Darwin, noticed such patterns and visualized a line dividing Asian and Austronesian organisms running through the Indonesian archipelago. This is called the Wallace Line.
The termite mound is chocolate cake filled with chocolate ganache. The pangolin is a cake flavoured with cinnamon, a variety of which is native to western Indonesia. The echidna is a cake flavoured with nutmeg, the seed of a fruit found on the eastern side of the Wallace Line. All decorations are made from marshmallow fondant and are edible.”
Second prize went to “Cakevergent Evolution,” an incredibly ambitious cake featuring myriad examples of convergent evolution. See how many you can spot in the photos! Third prize went to “Darwin’s Pigeons,” showing both parent and offspring generations in cake.
All participants went home with full bellies and a certificate for participating. Keep an eye on our website for details of next year’s FestEVOLVE programming. Check out the full series of photos on our flickr page.
Thank you to everyone who attended and participated in FestEVOLVE 2014. We hope to see you at our upcoming programs!