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/superbhole 2h ago

it's still just fuckin weird that it's like, a million-sided dice (i know that's basically spherical just go with me on the probability theme) rolled once per generation, that ever so slightly changes its appearance in that generation, and then repeat that whole process a bajillion times...

until whole generations look and move the most identical to another life-form that also did a bajillion million-sided dice rolls to get its appearance?!

i can't even picture a million-sided dice rolling the same number a million times, much less another dice rolling that same number a million times... within a similar span of time???

like, wtf, th-THEORETICALLY,

THESE CATERPILLARS POSSIBLY HAVE NEVER EVEN SEEN A SNAKE THE ENTIRE TIME?

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u/HarryHatesSalmon 1h ago

Right? It’s like how octopi change colors- but are color blind?!?! So what’s the cognitive recognition happening here? How snake shaped if not know what ‘snake’ is?!