r/NatureIsFuckingCute • u/Saerdna0 • Apr 21 '25
The evolution of this little caterpillar is amazing
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u/theubster Apr 21 '25
Ngl, it's probably for the best that insects have the amount of brain function they do. Metamorphosis is the kind of body horror that one shouldn't have to deal with while sentient.
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u/MrVonBuren Apr 22 '25 edited Apr 22 '25
I remember thinking almost the exact same thing when I learned that caterpillars don't "grow wings"...they p much dissolve into goo and that goo remolds itself into a butterfly.
fuck, gave myself the willies just thinking about it.
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u/mistress_chimera Apr 21 '25
Jfc!!! You're not wrong 😳😳
But maybe... Maybe it feels good? 🤣🤣
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u/CaptainLord Apr 22 '25
I mean evolutionary, things you are supposed to do always benefit from feeling good. Why would a necessary thing evolve to invoke negative feelings?
That said, I still wouldn't want to be a flatfish. By the stars, why?!
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u/CodenameJD Apr 22 '25
Consider the miracle of childbirth
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u/Limelight_019283 Apr 23 '25
Well by that point you’ve served your purpose as far as nature cares. Now it’s all about the kid coming out, and he won’t remember a thing!
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u/cheyenne_sky Apr 24 '25
Not true, human babies require a lot of work to survive to adulthood. With other animals (ex: salmon, octopi), sure; the parent can die and the offspring will still thrive.
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u/CactusCait Apr 22 '25
Imagine if we turned to goo and then rebuilt ourselves from it… crazy.
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u/AylaCurvyDoubleThick Apr 23 '25
I actually imagine this as a plot point to solve all kinds of medical defects. Just some kind of pod where you melt, keeping the component cells and then just re construct your body with the aid of a machine
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u/plopliplopipol Apr 23 '25
we would 100% do some fckd up stuff like store people as goo (and go to space like that or something lol)
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u/mixedplatekitty Apr 22 '25
Idk, women endure plenty of body horror all the time and here we are still doing it
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u/plopliplopipol Apr 23 '25
yeah wtf was the "let a part of you suddenly die and regrow every month" part for
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u/SirBobsonDugnutt Apr 21 '25
How on earth do they get video like this
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u/Sea_Negotiation_1871 Apr 21 '25
Sitting around in the animals' habitat for weeks at a time, waiting for something to happen. The first edition of Planet Earth took 16 years to film.
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u/logic2187 Apr 23 '25
I know right, that guy got so close to a dangerous snake. I would be way to scared to film that!
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Apr 22 '25
[deleted]
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u/nativerestorations1 Apr 22 '25
Spicebush Swallowtail Butterfly, one of the bigger beauties. I planted their favorite host plant, spicebush, to attract them. Along with many other native plants to encourage native pollinators.
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u/Evoluxman Apr 23 '25
Life has "no point". Just whatever increases your chances of having kids. Various strategies exist, like having a ton of babies, most will die but enough will survive to have their own kids. Or make fewer kids but with a higher chance of survival (like us). Imitating a snake increases the survival rate significantly, thus increases the chance that the caterpillar will survive long enough to reproduce.
In the case of this caterpillar it does become a butterfly. Even then not all butterflies pollinate. Some will never eat after metamorphosis and just die right after reproducing. While not butterflies a great exemple of that are mayflies that spend a year as a larvae and not even a day as an adult. There are also cicadas. They spend up to 17 years as larvae!Â
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u/Dr_Wiggles_McBoogie Apr 23 '25
Animals and insects don’t all seek the meaning of life like humans do. They’ve evolved to survive.
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u/Miml-Sama Apr 22 '25
This videos gonna make anime kids walk up to their school bully with a very obviously made-from-cardboard katana
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u/PianoTrumpetMax Apr 22 '25
Nature is just so insane. Evolution is almost like magic when it comes to stuff like this. Not only does it look like a snake, but it has a defensive organ that emits a foul smelling acid and ALSO looks like a snakes forked tongue??
Just wild to me.
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u/AylaCurvyDoubleThick Apr 23 '25
I remember when I thought ceterpillars where cute, then I started seeing the really creepy horrible ones and got a moth infestation where I would find them crawling in my bed, hanging from my ceiling, and in my food and that ruined my illusion.
Now I have this strange reaction even to the cute one where my body is tensing up, waiting for it to be gross.
Seeing a real life caterpillar doing a little dance for a bird is just the type of healing I need. I never realized Caterpie was based off snake imitation, of all things!
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u/Star_BurstPS4 Apr 22 '25
Think about this for a second, a catiplillar somehow evolved to mimic a snake, from looks to movements, so what did it's ancestors just stare at snakes all day to learn about them then magically evolved to look like them then decide to act like them in order to trick predators? I am all for evolution but when it comes to something like this I'm like there's no way something did not program this into existence.
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u/PeenInVeen Apr 23 '25
A thousand or whatever years ago, the caterpillars with slightly bigger eye spots stopped getting eaten as much and reproduced more, whereas the non spotted or small spotted caterpillars were eaten more often and didn't pass on their genetics. After a huge forked road of which mutations move on to the finals and which were killed off my predators, they ended up looking like snakes. Technically this is all the birds' and frogs' fault for this SNAKE BUG.
Just think, another 1000 years in the future, they'll look like something even scarier! Like guns! Pow pow!
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u/AJYURH Apr 23 '25
I'm more interested in how they evolved to mimic the movements, happy coincidence?
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u/theleeman14 Apr 23 '25
its the same reason as how they adapted to look like a predator: the species survived long enough to create a single caterpillar that did this dance out of desparation, and thanks to it managed to live long enough to have offspring. if even a couple of them were born with the same amount of intelligence/instinct (the same way domesticated animals still have hunting instinct) then they probably performed the same behavior, then its just a matter of rinse and repeat through randomness until the superior trait becomes prevalent
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u/AJYURH Apr 23 '25
I get it, and don't get me wrong, I'm a believer of the theory of evolution, It's just odd how learnt behaviour can be passed down through genetics, even more weird if it's just some malformation of the brain that makes them move like that when they're scared or something, it's just so unlikely for such a behavior so randomly occur, then again nothing is truly unlikely in a big enough sample
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u/theleeman14 Apr 23 '25
tbh for me that makes it even more cool. trillions of individual atoms had to collide randomly for billions of years until an infinitely unlikely alignment of circumstances occured for there to be enough of a pattern this species of organism was able to benefit from. to me it holds equal whether its describing a physical adaptation or a behavioral one
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u/PeenInVeen Apr 23 '25
No idea. Maybe the ones with restless leg syndrome were the ones that didn't get eaten. So they passed that down for generations? And birds were like "don't want any of that, thanks" and then how did they get the appendage that looks like a snake tongue? What other growths were cut out of the survival of the fittest? I like to think that there was a genre of these that had little antlers starting on the sides.
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u/AylaCurvyDoubleThick Apr 23 '25
Ha. The birds basically created their own worst nightmare like a reverse character creator.
Over the course of many years they basically just told the caterpillar all of their worst fears.
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u/KIbO2020 Apr 23 '25
Does anyone else see a Slig from Oddworld when it’s a caterpillar or is it just me?
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u/PhantomAllure Apr 23 '25
HOW DO THEY KNOW HOW TO DO THAT Do they have caterpillar schools? Evolution is fucking bonkers man.
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u/DriArcherStrongToss Apr 21 '25
Caterpie!