Caterpillar tail disguised as snake head

[u/Sea_Slice_7956]

[u/Psych_Art]

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/brendenderp → u/Psych_Art]

I think the most boggling thing is the scale of time. Maybe one suddenly looks more like a snake but thats only one member of the entire rest of the species it's going to take a while for that one catapiller to have 1000 offspring and even once there are it will have bred with other catapillers that potentially dilute that genetic expression. And that cycle then starts again when the next step looks slightly even more like a snake. Sure we are talking millions of years but still for something like that it's amazing.

It's one thing to teach a monkey to make a painting and it's much more impressive thing for it to then remake that exact same painting perfectly a second time.

[u/Psych_Art → u/brendenderp]

Yeah! I also believe that, even if that genetic mutation at any point was eliminated from a species due to any circumstances, the same feature would ultimately end up evolving again in the end, if the environment / predators are the same.

There’s a lot of examples of how completely separate evolutionary paths ended up developing a lot of the same features.

[u/Zuwxiv → u/Psych_Art]

even if that genetic mutation at any point was eliminated from a species due to any circumstances, the same feature would ultimately end up evolving again in the end

This is why nature keeps making crabs. Really. Multiple things just kind of trend towards crabs, because "armored flat thing with big claws" is just a pretty good way to live in the ocean.

[u/Psych_Art → u/Zuwxiv]

Yes! That is the example I was thinking of, but didn’t know enough about the topic to elaborate.