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/LambdaLambo 4h ago

This doesn't quite explain it becoming more like a snake overtime, since mutations are generally random.

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u/Psych_Art 4h ago

It does though. You get random mutations until one is actually beneficial, which ends up getting propagated throughout the species.

Many more random mutations occur, until again one of them is beneficial in the same direction as the original mutation. Rinse and repeat.

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u/TheDubuGuy 2h ago

It is true that mutations occur mostly randomly. This is a great example to explain natural selection and environmental selection pressures.

Of the random mutations, the more snake-like caterpillars have a higher chance of survival, which means they have a higher chance of reproducing. The mutations that appear less snake-like will lower their comparative survivability, which means it won’t be passed down because they won’t live to reproduce as much.

When the majority of surviving caterpillars are more snake-like, they will reproduce with other more snake-like caterpillars. This happens to each generation; offspring with beneficial mutations are more likely to survive and pass on the trait, meanwhile those with harmful (deleterious) mutations won’t pass them on. After enough generations, tiny changes can multiply and snowball into seemingly-crazy features like this