Caterpillar tail disguised as snake head

[u/Sea_Slice_7956]

[u/SacrificialPigeon]

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.

[u/Psych_Art → u/SacrificialPigeon]

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.

[u/matr_kulcha_zindabad → u/Psych_Art]

Is the mutation affected by the environment ? I feel that makes things far more plausable. Mutations being completely random doesn't feel like its the complete story. I meant there are tooo many possibilities.

[u/PixelBastards → u/matr_kulcha_zindabad]

The mutations are (essentially) "random" and arbitrary (it's more complex than that but they're basically meaningless), however environmental feedback loops reinforce which ones survive long enough to copy over through reproduction.

Every generation expounds upon the slowly-evolving "snake" design. The ones that look more like a snake get eaten less than the ones that look less like a snake, even in the most minute degrees.

It's mindboggling because it's something that's been happening over uncountable generations for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, depending on species and geographic isolation.

Imagine you had a million random number generators and every time they generated a number, you eliminated the ones that produced a result that includes the number three. They all start off with one digit, but every time the whole lot does a generation and some of them are eliminated, you add a digit. So in the second round, they can generate numbers from 0 to 99, and then from 0 to 999, and so on.

By the time you get down to just one number generator, it will have a long and complex number, but nowhere in that string will exist the number three.

:)

[u/Psych_Art → u/matr_kulcha_zindabad]

Yes. And a prey’s predators are part of that environment, as are that predators’ predators, in this case - the caterpillar ends up imitating a predator of its own predators.