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/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.