Making the Change The Apocynaceae plant family produces toxic cardenolids. However, many insects have managed to escape the deleterious effects of these chemicals and even, in some cases, use them in their own defense. Zhen et al. (p. 1634 ) investigated a broad range of taxa and found several examples of parallel changes, as well as duplications, in members of the ATPα family that likely explain the shift to allow insects to avoid the toxic effects of these plants. Thus, natural selection can harness a combination of gene duplication, protein evolution, and regulatory evolution to allow distantly related species to adapt to specific niches.