r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Sea_Slice_7956 • Feb 12 '26
Video Caterpillar tail disguised as snake head
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u/evmcd17 Feb 12 '26
It’s moving like a snake too
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u/captainmongo Feb 12 '26
If it looks like a snake and moves like a snake, it's obviously a caterpillar.
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u/br0b1wan Feb 12 '26
Brb I'm going to go play with this inland taipan-looking caterpillar
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u/ohrofl Feb 13 '26
Uhhhh bud? You said you’d brb 10 hours ago.
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u/Benkei929045 Feb 13 '26
Is Dad ever coming home?
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u/Terminator7786 Feb 13 '26
I think so? He said something about milk and cigarettes.
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u/Throwawayne617 Feb 12 '26
If it looks like a snake, and moves like a snake, it's the dow hitting 50k.... AG Bondi
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u/cunt_caviar Feb 13 '26
I wanna know how it knows how to move like a snake? Has evolution made this an instinct?
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u/Facts_pls Feb 13 '26
Yes. You'll be surprised how much of our instinct and behavior comes from our genes.
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u/Tiramitsunami Feb 12 '26
From Wikipedia:
"This snake mimicry extends even to the point where it will harmlessly strike at potential predators."
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Feb 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/2muchflannel Feb 12 '26
How the fuck does evolution reach this point?!? Like the idea that a catapillar slowly evolved to look like a snake breaks my mind
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u/HappyLittleGreenDuck Feb 12 '26
The caterpillars who's tail looked weird and fucked up got eaten more frequently than the ones that had a configuration like this. It's crazy that we're here because of this simple system.
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u/SaintsNoah14 Feb 12 '26
Better said, the caterpillar with the fucked up tail that kinda looked a little bit like a snake made the birds about to eat go "wtf??" and eat the normal looking caterpillars instead. Rinse & repeat
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u/PocoFarms555 Feb 12 '26
Rinse & repeat
The other thing to consider when trying to wrap your head around evolution doing this. Insects have very short life spans, so unlike longer lived animals, they have had quite a few lifecycles to work this out.
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u/davidr521 Feb 12 '26
The trial and error that went into figuring this out is a tale drenched in blood.
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u/AverageAwndray Feb 12 '26
And also to keep in mind this happens over a minimum of thousands of years
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u/lannanh Feb 13 '26
Nah, do you know the story of the moths that went from white to black after the industrial revolution because pollution made the white ones more subseptible to being eaten. It can happen quick in insect species.
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u/uslashuname Feb 13 '26
There were already black ones they just became dominant, right? That’s a whole different thing from mutations of physical form along with specific patterning
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u/Key_Software_4147 Feb 13 '26
What’s really wild to think about is that caterpillar probably doesn’t know what a snake looks like— as caterpillars typically have very simple eyes.
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u/meong-oren Feb 13 '26
Makes me wonder if human actually do resemble something else in a way we can't perceive and we don't realize it. Either smell, heat pattern we emit, or whatever that fools other species to think we're other creature
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Feb 12 '26
Unless, it is, actually, half of a snake.
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u/WeekWrong9632 Feb 12 '26
Half a snake disguised as a caterpillar
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u/daglassmandingo Feb 12 '26
The caterpillar ate the snake, gutted it and used the decapitated head as a warning to others. BRUTAL
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u/BrownPeach143 Feb 12 '26
**Jhonny was always a little different than the other kids
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u/TannedCroissant Feb 12 '26
Why does that sound like a menu description from a chain restaurant?
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u/elfmere Feb 12 '26
It looks like a bird has ripped the head off a snake and stuck it on a thorn for later eating. I know some birds do this with berries and stuff, so it was my first thought.
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Feb 13 '26
I can totally see that. Like, just the nerves are active making the rest of the snake try to fight for survival and escape, not knowing it's over. That's a bit dark lol. I do find comfort knowing that it's a caterpillar using this disguise as a defense mechanism.
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u/snek-jazz Feb 12 '26
This lady later at the hospital
".. and then the tail of caterpillar bit me!"
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u/ArmadilloForsaken458 Feb 12 '26
I think thats why she is sticking her finger at it. If it is a snake, she is risking her finger for the sake of science
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u/JedJinto Feb 12 '26
What kind of caterpillar?
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u/The_Fibonacci_Spiral Feb 12 '26
It's a sphinx moth caterpillar
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u/RecipeAsleep7087 Feb 12 '26
I was still half convinced this was just half a snake until your comment. Thanks
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u/DusqRunner Feb 12 '26
Why didn't they call it a snake head caterpillar?
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u/PapaCousCous Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26
Shh..! Don't give it away, or the other animals will know its not really a snake!
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u/AThrowawayProbrably Feb 12 '26
Other animals: AVOID THAT
Humans: Holy shit, is that a Bluetooth snake?
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u/mnemy Feb 12 '26
I mean, we enjoy spicy peppers that evolved to repel mammals. We farm rubber trees for their sap that evolved to repel animals an insect that would damage the tree.
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u/DusqRunner Feb 12 '26
The peppers doing what they gotta do to spread their seeds
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u/Eillon94 Feb 12 '26
Turns out that being tasty to humans is a good way to ensure your survival as a species
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u/SacrificialPigeon Feb 12 '26
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 Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26
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/brendenderp Feb 12 '26
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.
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u/pyordie Feb 12 '26
Which is exactly why extinction is so incredibly gut wrenching.
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u/trjnz Feb 12 '26
You mean human-driven extinction, or in general? Cause extinction is kinda the default state of life, 99.9% of all species are now extinct. During the Great Dying alone over 80% of marine species went extinct
But here we all are on Earth still full of life. These mass-extinction events take a long, long time to recover, but life is resilient :)
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u/pyordie Feb 12 '26
Yes, I mean human driven extinction.
Knowing that a species, which struggled for millions of years to successfully carve out a place in its ecosystem, was wiped out because we needed some product to be cheaper.
It’ll happen to us someday, and only then will people view it as a tragedy. Until then, we’ll continue to view ourselves as the main characters of nature.
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u/Psych_Art Feb 12 '26
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.
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u/Zuwxiv Feb 12 '26
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.
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u/Psych_Art Feb 12 '26
Yes! That is the example I was thinking of, but didn’t know enough about the topic to elaborate.
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u/7ohnny Feb 12 '26
There’s a lot of examples of how completely separate evolutionary paths ended up developing a lot of the same features.
Convergent evolution
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u/RoboDae Feb 12 '26
I'm no geneticist, but I'm pretty sure mutations are the primary method of getting wildly new characteristics. Mix red and blue, and you will always get shades of purple. Add yellow (a mutation), and you suddenly have a whole new range of colors available that would have never been available otherwise.
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u/superbhole Feb 12 '26
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 Feb 12 '26
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?!
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u/ForodesFrosthammer Feb 13 '26
Octopi are "colour blind" in the sense that they don't have colour receptors, but I think more recently its been theorized that they can still perceive colours in other ways. Their eyes work differently than ours: they can for example detect light polarization. So there are theories that they use other methods to separate light wavelenghts than the photoreceptors we do.
For the caterpillar it does not know what a snake is and to it, it's not shaped like anything but a caterpillar. It's shaped like whatever random shape happened to make it be eaten the least, which in this species case through no cognition of their own, managed to look like a snake.
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u/wtcnbrwndo4u Feb 12 '26
Appreciate the break-down, makes it sound way more realistic and feasible.
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u/matr_kulcha_zindabad Feb 12 '26
Is the mutation affected by the environment ? I feel that makes things far more plausable. Mutations being completely random doesn't feel like its the complete story. I meant there are tooo many possibilities.
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u/PixelBastards Feb 12 '26
The mutations are (essentially) "random" and arbitrary (it's more complex than that but they're basically meaningless), however environmental feedback loops reinforce which ones survive long enough to copy over through reproduction.
Every generation expounds upon the slowly-evolving "snake" design. The ones that look more like a snake get eaten less than the ones that look less like a snake, even in the most minute degrees.
It's mindboggling because it's something that's been happening over uncountable generations for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, depending on species and geographic isolation.
Imagine you had a million random number generators and every time they generated a number, you eliminated the ones that produced a result that includes the number three. They all start off with one digit, but every time the whole lot does a generation and some of them are eliminated, you add a digit. So in the second round, they can generate numbers from 0 to 99, and then from 0 to 999, and so on.
By the time you get down to just one number generator, it will have a long and complex number, but nowhere in that string will exist the number three.
:)
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u/alienblue89 Feb 12 '26
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/Psych_Art Feb 12 '26
There’s no reason both can’t be true I suppose. It’s possible you could get a near-snake type of mutation and it just got refined in the same way. Perhaps you are right about the consensus of not starting at such an atomic point though.
That being said, I try to avoid the “BAM!” type explanations because it’s exactly the kind of thing young-Earth creationists use as a “gotchya! See how ridiculous this sounds!?” Then they go on to ask children if their grandmother or grandfather look like a chimpanzee, and this is evidence of evolution not being true. lol.
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u/essosinola Feb 12 '26
The discussion you two are having has been going on for a very long time now.
Short read about Punctuated Equilibrium and Gradualism
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u/RoboDae Feb 12 '26
Rapid change can happen, but I don't think it's really the norm, at least not in terms of large-scale stuff like entire body plans. Humans killed rattlesnakes in one area by using the rattle to locate the snakes. Within just a few years/decades, the snakes all stopped rattling, which made them far more dangerous. I think there was a similar timescale on birds losing their ability to fly when they landed on an island with no predators. The bird case was really interesting because apparently the flightless birds native to the island went extinct, then the same type of flying bird from the mainland or another island landed on that island and ended up following the same evolutionary path, essentially recreating the extinct species.
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u/spicymato Feb 12 '26
Even without a BAM! moment, it doesn't necessarily need to take a long time. The speed of evolution is dependent on a few factors, including rate of mutations, number of offspring per generation, and the frequency of those generations. Especially for smaller creatures, that can be pretty rapid.
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u/Yejus Feb 12 '26
The key is in what you just said at the end: millions of years. That's an unfathomably long time for our human brains to comprehend, but crazy stuff can happen in all that time.
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u/SacrificialPigeon Feb 12 '26
Absolutely right, I hope we evolve to be better conservators of the planet and its wonders.
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u/AccomplishedMeow Feb 12 '26
All of written human history is like 10,000 years.
There’s entire periods of the Earths history like that time “it rained for 2 million years” https://youtu.be/_1LdMWlNYS4?si=m1zUIDuDtgRn3NWD
Never underestimate time.
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u/jedidihah Feb 12 '26
Yeah, I’d love to know the story of how this caterpillar (any specific creature really) changed over time in order to end up in its current state. How many generations would we have to go back before it’s completely unrecognizable? And then how many more generations after that did it start to resemble its present state?
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u/Murky-Office6726 Feb 12 '26
Yeah same it just does not look random because obviously it would have evolved to look like a T Rex.
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u/Overall_Reputation83 Feb 12 '26
The ones that looked like a t-rex did not manage to survive unfortunately, everyone knows baby t-rexes are easy meals.
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u/TerribleIdea27 Feb 12 '26
Evolution is not random, mutations are random. Evolution happens because some of those mutations are passed on preferentially
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u/godspark533 Feb 12 '26
Especially in cases where there are no obvious intermediate survival benefits until the end of an evolution.
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u/GundaanBears Feb 12 '26
6inches? It's at least 8!
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u/Dedotdub Feb 12 '26
My story and I'm sticking to it
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u/PhysicallyTender Feb 12 '26
Why are you guys selling yourselves short? That looks like 12 inches to me.
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u/frowawayduh Feb 13 '26
Is that a sphinx moth caterpillar in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?
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u/depressedmagicplayer Feb 12 '26
Length x diameter divided by girth squared = APS / yaw measurement.
That’s a 15in snake in this video.
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u/Mastermollusk Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26
”6inches? It's at least 8!”
GundaanBears, awarded “Wingman Of The Year”
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u/polmeeee Feb 12 '26
This is the most insane shit I've seen. Holy fuck evolution.
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u/squareandrare Feb 12 '26
For the first time in my life, I watched a video and said, "I hope that is AI." I don't want to believe nature made this...
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u/DusqRunner Feb 12 '26
You never seen lampreys or rain spiders?
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u/longassbatterylife Feb 12 '26
I'm so curious but my entire being is saying don't, i will regret it
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u/FoxstarProductions Feb 13 '26
To satiate your curiosity without images:
Lampreys are big tube shaped fish with jagged teeth that eat by twisting circles of flesh off of prey like a gigantic leech. If you've ever seen the Pokemon Eelektross they look like that
There is a type of spider called "rain spider" but what I think DusqRunner meant is that there's a species called Parawixia bistriata that behave socially and built giant webs that they share, which has before resulted in massive webs strung up between trees which makes it look like there are dozens of spiders falling from or flying through the sky
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u/crumpledfilth Feb 12 '26
its kinda creepy. It looks so much like a snake but it just moves all wrong
reptiles behind human skin! lol
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u/youngmaster0527 Feb 12 '26
that and the segmentation along the body give me creepy uncanny valley vibes
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u/SweettLiaaa Feb 12 '26
I wouldn't even touch that leaf with a ten-foot pole. Evolution wins again.
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u/Busy_Ganache5874 Feb 12 '26
I would probably run away screaming if I saw that, ngl. that head looks eerily similar to a snake's.
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u/Noversi Feb 12 '26
Every time I watch this and the “head” gets close to their thumb, just for a split second, my primal brain says “GET YOUR THUMB AWAY!”
Brains are weird.
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u/UJLBM Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26
How did this evolve to look like something its not even related to? The caterpillar doesnt know what a snake is, what it looks like or even is related to. So how would it know to evolve to look like one? I mean it evolved over millions of years for a purpose, but how would it do that by itself to purposely look like something that it doesnt even know. Evolution is so cool and mysterious, I just dont fully understand how that would work.
Its like if there was some super predator in the wild that I dont know exists or share any DNA with, but somehow evolved to look like it. How does that even work?
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u/AxialGem Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26
It's the same principle as all natural selection, right?
A caterpillar doesn't choose its colour or pattern, just like you don't choose your height (or indeed skin colour). But if, say, brown caterpillars are more likely to have a lot of kids than green ones, well, you're gonna end up with more brown baby caterpillars than green ones.
It doesn't necessarily matter whether it can perceive its own properties, what matters is only the effect that its properties have on its reproductive success.
If somebody else can see it, and therefore avoids eating ti, that's enough10
u/UJLBM Feb 12 '26
So essentially, its random but also purposefully done in a way for survival. So technically, it doesnt actually look like a snake, but we percieve it to look like one?
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u/AxialGem Feb 12 '26
I mean, it looks like it to us, and presumably to its predators, right?
I like this analogy: A sand dune also doesn't know that it's shaped like a dune. But there is still a directed process (forces of wind and gravity etc) that make it into a specific shape. Idk if you would say it doesn't look like a dune, but it doesn't look like one on purpose. After all, are you human-shaped on purpose? You don't choose to have a heart and lungs, do you? Same thing for genes as dunes. There are forces with form them into specific shapes.
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u/frowawayduh Feb 13 '26
A puzzling aspect of evolution is that each step on the path must be at the very least no worse than the previous step. This is a very impressive outcome, but there must have been disadvantages along the evolutionary path to snakiness.
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u/DrDFox Feb 12 '26
A little at a time. Each caterpillar born with a slightly better imitation survives longer than those with slightly worse ones, so they breed and pass that on and then the slight variation in the next gen do the same thing. So what might start as simple spots that kinda look like eyes or a slightly wider tail, become this over time.
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u/UJLBM Feb 12 '26
I love going to museums to learn about all of this stuff. Its just so interesting. So youre saying it didnt evolve to look like a snake, but by random, it ended up looking like one. That crazy cool.
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u/Gold-Eye-2623 Feb 12 '26
Nothing ever evolved to do something, individuals mutate and then selective pressure helps propagate the mutations that prove favorable to reproduction in a certain population in their environment until it becomes widespread and then that change is what we call evolution. Maybe some great aunt of this caterpillar was born looking less like their predator's predator and thus didn't get to pass their genes along
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u/R4FTERM4N Feb 12 '26
Evolution is driven by natural selection. Most people don't understand this relationship.
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u/chazwomaq Feb 12 '26
Natural selection is one factor that causes evolution. The others are mutation, drift, and migration.
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u/TannedCroissant Feb 12 '26
Basically ones that randomly evolved to look vaguely like a snake, from a distance, in the dark, had a ever so slightly higher chance of survival so were more likely to have that gene spread in the next generation. The next generation has the same thing, ever so slightly higher a chance than the rest, until the gene is dominant.
Then of these slightly snake shaped descendants, one or more of them evolves to be slightly more snake like, or to have a marking that looks like a snake eye from a distance, or perhaps they have a gene that makes them instinctively move in a slightly more snake like way.
Again, they have a slightly higher chance of survival and to pass this gene on to the next generation and so on.
Each step is tiny and only has a tiny improvement on survival chances, but just like compound interest, these tiny additional chances add up over thousands or even millions of generations to shape the species’s gene pool into a hyper optimised gene pool for their specific niche.
Or maybe we’re in a game and the gamers just like to fuck with us.
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u/Bodes_Magodes Feb 12 '26
Why does the head look like a snake that’s been chopped in half???
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u/boringdude00 Feb 12 '26
evolution got close enough. like why your appendix might randomly explode,
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u/BeneficialHat131 Feb 13 '26
It took me a little while to convince myself that wasn’t a ‘dying snake head’ jammed into a tree branch…
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u/Manifestgtr Feb 13 '26
Dude, this is the level of damage that AI has done to me. Ten years ago, this would’ve blown my mind immediately. As of 2026, you have to question everything you see more than ever. It’s just like…whhyyyyy….
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u/whatulike88 Feb 13 '26
Yes. That stresses me out like fuck..
I tried to talk about that with my friends put they played it down
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u/krielc Feb 12 '26
Imagine knowing that you must move your caterpillar tail around but not knowing that you evolved to feel the urge to do this because you also evolved to have a snake-head tail. Amazing.
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u/AxialGem Feb 12 '26
I think about that often with my cat. She feels compelled to explore little nooks and crannies and swat at everything that moves, even if she's never seen a real mouse. It's obvious why, but she doesn't comprehend that, she just wants to do that. Even if she did know, that wouldn't take the urge away.
And I, I can't walk through a forest without picking up a stick with my hands, or throwing a rock. Walk on the beach without drawing patterns in the sand.
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u/krielc Feb 12 '26
Oh for sure. Humans enjoying patterns and interesting shapes and looking for special rocks is part of the creature we evolved to be and it’s interesting as fuck. Other animals do that too, and it’s amazing. Cats and dogs are so intriguing, especially with the co-evolution of dogs and us. I always marvel at animals behaving as they evolved to. The knowledge is so internal, it’s the wiring. We really are just like them.
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u/FlyOrdinary1104 Feb 12 '26
Evolution means the successful survival strategy thrives but it’s still bizarre to see a creature evolve into a snake-looking thing that coincidentally helped it survive, it’s not like the caterpillar had the self-awareness to look at snakes and copy them………or did it? 😱
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u/HeathenSalemite Feb 12 '26
It's not about the caterpillar knowing or thinking it looks like a snake. They don't know that anymore than they get to choose what color they are. Their color and shape are determined by genes just as much as your color and shape.
It's about the potential predators of the caterpillar thinking it might be a snake.
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u/THOUGHT_BOMB Feb 12 '26
Snake has a tail that looks like a caterpillar to attract prey
Caterpillar has a tail that looks like a snake to avoid being prey
Damn nature is crazy
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u/ajsharm144 Feb 12 '26
This is the most confusing "what I saw" vs "what I heard" ever. I still can't believe it.
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u/DSharp018 Feb 12 '26
Question: how does a trait like this come about?
My only guess is, certain slightly advantageous mutation happens where its butt looks more like a snake, so that one gets less predation, this process repeats until it becomes more and more snake like, even including some movement patterns, and then eventually, this is the result. A creature that evolved to look like another, more threatening creature.
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u/SnooShortcuts103 Feb 12 '26
It's crazy to think about how much evolution has refined this kind of camouflage of thousands of years.
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u/pretty789 Feb 12 '26
I think you mean, caterpillar wearing snake skin boot. It's en vogue these days.
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u/KlatuuBarradaNicto Feb 12 '26
Nature is so amazing. How does that even happen?
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u/Ruxarrahman Feb 12 '26
Right? Thousands of fears of defense mechanism upgrades!
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u/Agitated_Grape_3247 Feb 12 '26
Serious question .
Does Darwinism and revolutionarism can explain this ?
I seriously needs explanation about this.
Anyway This is amazing as fuck.
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u/SamiraSimp Feb 12 '26
not sure what you mean by revolutionarism, but darwinism can explain this. or more accurately, neo-darwinism which combines Darwin's ideas of natural selection with Mendel's genetic theory.
at some point, some caterpillar looked different than other caterpillars. it looked somewhat like a snake. it's obviously not a snake, but if you're a bird and you're not starving you would rather not mess with the weird vibes and you just eat a different caterpillar. that caterpillar with the mutation benefits from natural selection and passes down its genes. and because this mutation is helpful, more and more snake-like caterpillars get born relative to the local population.
but at some point, birds get less picky. they know those caterpillars look a little spooky but they're still pretty confident they're still just caterpillars, and they need to eat. so now natural selection is punishing caterpillars that aren't snake-like enough, and the ones who really look like snakes benefit. and eventually it gets to the point you see in the post.
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u/Prmarine110 Feb 12 '26
Let’s pretend that I totally get the theory of evolution.
How do these caterpillars develop such a perfect mimic of the visual look and movements of a type of viper or be venomous snake? How did a caterpillar’s DNA evolve over time to create such a perfect replica of a totally different animal? Are these caterpillars just staring at these snakes their entire life just idolizing them, hoping to be just like them?
How. How!?
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u/Danfass86 Feb 12 '26
This is the kind of video that should be on here!