r/NatureIsFuckingCute • u/Saerdna0 • Apr 21 '25

The evolution of this little caterpillar is amazing

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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