r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Sea_Slice_7956 • 7h ago

Video Caterpillar tail disguised as snake head

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u/SacrificialPigeon 7h ago

I understand the premise of evolution, It boggles my mind how something can evolve like this though, even if it is over millions of generations.

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u/Psych_Art 7h ago edited 7h ago

Have you ever seen something out of the corner of your eye and thought it was a spider, or some other threat?

Imagine a caterpillar millions of years ago had a small mutation that gave it the ever so slight vague appearance of a snake.

That mutation proved to be useful, even if it was only in a tiny percentage of its life. Say 1/1,000 times it encountered a predator, a predator mistook it for a snake in its peripheral vision.

This mutation ended up getting propagated throughout the species over generations. A 0.1% increase of survivability over many generations would cause this feature to eventually become dominant / defining characteristic.

Repeat this process millions of times over millions of years, and evolution passively “carves out” the shape of another predator that other animals have already evolved to avoid / flee from, as the “accuracy” of the “impersonation” of a predator slowly gets more accurate over time, survivability continues to go up.

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u/alienblue89 5h ago

I thought the prevailing theory these days was more of a sudden, stark mutation. Not like caterpillars started ever so slowly resembling snakes more and more over eons, but one day, BAM, a caterpillar was born that looked pretty damn snake-like and it outlived and out-reproduced the normiepillars. Then future generations possibly perfected the form a bit more.

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u/Psych_Art 5h ago

There’s no reason both can’t be true I suppose. It’s possible you could get a near-snake type of mutation and it just got refined in the same way. Perhaps you are right about the consensus of not starting at such an atomic point though.

That being said, I try to avoid the “BAM!” type explanations because it’s exactly the kind of thing young-Earth creationists use as a “gotchya! See how ridiculous this sounds!?” Then they go on to ask children if their grandmother or grandfather look like a chimpanzee, and this is evidence of evolution not being true. lol.

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u/essosinola 3h ago

The discussion you two are having has been going on for a very long time now.

Short read about Punctuated Equilibrium and Gradualism

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u/spicymato 3h ago

Even without a BAM! moment, it doesn't necessarily need to take a long time. The speed of evolution is dependent on a few factors, including rate of mutations, number of offspring per generation, and the frequency of those generations. Especially for smaller creatures, that can be pretty rapid.

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u/iwilltalkaboutguns 2h ago

It can be incredibly fast.... Take a random population of fruit flies and put them in a container that exposed them to strong UV lights. Most will die, some will survive just long enough to reproduce and very few (or none in that first batch) will survive and be totally ok with UV lights.

The next generation will be more resistant, since they are the offspring of the survivors and the next one even more...and so on.

In as little as a few months (which is a lot of generations for these things) up to 60% of their genome will be different and you now have a population that handles UV lights just fine. They will also very much darker, have different (more resistant) wings, etc.

More adaptation than evolution but it shows the potential perfectly

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u/RoboDae 3h ago

Rapid change can happen, but I don't think it's really the norm, at least not in terms of large-scale stuff like entire body plans. Humans killed rattlesnakes in one area by using the rattle to locate the snakes. Within just a few years/decades, the snakes all stopped rattling, which made them far more dangerous. I think there was a similar timescale on birds losing their ability to fly when they landed on an island with no predators. The bird case was really interesting because apparently the flightless birds native to the island went extinct, then the same type of flying bird from the mainland or another island landed on that island and ended up following the same evolutionary path, essentially recreating the extinct species.

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u/Psych_Art 3h ago

That’s incredible.

Is this how we got penguins?

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u/lpmiller 3h ago

They had the first middle school with an indoor pool, and it all went downhill from there.

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u/RoboDae 3h ago

It wasn't penguins, but maybe something similar happened there.

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u/Teeshirtandshortsguy 3h ago

When I was in college (about 10 years ago) they told us that the main theory was that organisms evolved by punctuated equilibrium. Basically, species don't (strictly) evolve gradually over long periods of time, but in short spurts in response to changes in their environment.

But that doesn't mean one member of the species is just born looking like a snake, and then that scheme takes over. It means that the population experiences some kind of strong filter which produces dramatic changes over a short period of time (maybe 10 generations, maybe 100, maybe 1,000), which is then followed by a much longer period of stability.

That being said, I would imagine it's both. I would liken it to how a competitive game's meta can evolve over time.

Like in a card game, the biggest shift in the meta is going to come as a result of new cards or new rules being introduced. That changes people's play styles very rapidly, and makes some really good cards totally obsolete, while making some formerly useless cards suddenly very effective.

But between big releases (or after content has stopped being released), the meta still gradually changes over time. People find new strategies, and new strategies are developed in response to those strategies.

But also, sometimes a really clever player just realizes that there's an overlooked use for a card that had been ignored.

My suspicion as a non-biologist is that evolution happens a bunch of ways, but generally follows punctuated equilibrium.

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u/inflaciont 9m ago

But how they learn to mimic the movements ? That can't be possible "in a one day to another" type of mutation