More Pseudo-Mimicry

Or should that be 'quasi-mimicry' -- which expression better conveys the idea that it's accidental and without utility or purpose?  Not sure, but in any case here is another eventuation of me-almost-stepping-on-plant-just-happening-to-resemble-insect -- in this instance, a big hairy squat-bodied moth.

I wonder if this fascination with mimicry and camouflage is rooted in an unconscious desire on my part to disappear, to be safely immune to being seen and disapproved of.

Related post;  Pseudo-Mimicry

Pseudo-Mimicry

('QUASI-MIMICRY'?  'FAUX-MIMICRY'?  ANYWAY...)

One of my favorite insects (this individual was residing in Japan a few years ago).

And a faux-insect from the other day (right outside my office here in Downey, California).

It should be noted here that I almost stepped on that second object while out walking, and it was only at the last instant I noticed it and turned my foot to avoid smashing it flat.  Only then did I realize it was not a bug, but a piece of plant detritus.  One might say it 'survived' because of its accidental resemblance to a living creature.

Which reminded me of a wonderful bit of satirical speculation from Charles Fort, the American iconoclast who spent decades of his life uncovering strange and odd events that were reported in newspapers, then quickly forgotten because they were 'absurd' and did not fit conventional views of the world.  In regard to the evolution of leaf insects, Fort first presented the conventional evolutionary hypothesis -- that once upon a time some species of insect came into being that accidentally somewhat resembled leaves;  that they were more likely to escape being eaten by birds because of this accidental mimicry, and so surviving disproportionately, they passed on their resemblance to their offspring.  And of those offspring, the ones that resembled leaves still better survived disproportionately to pass on their greater resemblance, and so on.

He then imagined that creatures from some other world who happened to visit Earth after the extinction of humanity, upon seeing paintings in art galleries, might well suppose that once upon a time some canvases that were randomly daubed on with paint appeared.  That, of those canvases, the ones that just happened to resemble real objects were protected, and so on until paintings that exactly resembled people and objects came into being, all without conscious intention by painters.

An intriguing piece of thoughtful humor -- but of course, Fort lived and worked before the flowering of Abstract Expressionism in the mid-20 century.  Abstract paintings do not depend on protective mimicry to survive.

Sun-Dappled Blacktop

Fooled ya -- this is not a pool, but the asphalt surface of a restaurant parking lot (I guess we do eat out a lot).  Soon as I noticed the 'rippling' cracks, I knew all I had to do was add blue.

PERFECT MIMICRY

Being Invisible

"SAY, HAS THAT HOUSE ALWAYS HAD TWO CHIMNEYS?"


Like many people I have been fascinated by the idea of invisibility since I was little. But not with the classic, transparent-as-the-air kind of invisibility. There are different ways of being invisible, and my fascination was not so much with literal invisibility, but with camouflage -- by that I mean disguising the body to resemble either something else or the general background so that it is unnoticeable, not merely covering up or hiding.  Camouflage done to perfection is effectively equivalent to invisibility -- and I suspect a lot of people share my fascination with the subject. Why do I find camouflage-invisibility more intriguing than transparency-invisibility? I suppose one reason is that it seems so tantalizingly attainable in real life, because we see other creatures do it, like leaf insects, walking sticks, octopodes and cuttlefish, even "The Thing" (I'm referring to the mimetic monster from the John W. Campbell Jr. story and the John Carpenter movie it inspired, not the stone-man from the Fantastic Four). And of course, those wonderful photos of Veruschka and others disappearing, their bodies painted to exactly replace the background they are obscuring.


But I suspect another, perhaps more important reason is that the idea of hiding in plain sight is way more adventuresome -- deliciously thrilling if it's us doing it; spooky and creepy if it's someone -- or something -- else doing it to us. Donald Wollheim captured the essence of the latter concept so well in the short story "Mimic", which is about the idea that weird, camouflaged creatures live openly in our midst; even though we encounter them all the time, we don't notice them because some mimic the appearance of common objects and others because they resemble 'fringe people' we don't look at too closely and would rather stay away from anyhow (BTW, if you've only seen the movie Mimic, run out to the library and check out the story it's based on -- the movie is just another standard monster flick with little of the strangeness and originality of the story). Like, "Say, has that rock always been there?", or "Funny, I never noticed the Johnsons' house has two chimneys..?"(cue eerie music).

I once read that there are ant-mimicking insects that actually live among ants, protected from their enemies by the ant colony (I wonder if there are other benefits;  do they also feed on the ants? -- now, that would be a true nightmare from the ants' POV). They are not absolutely perfect copies of ants; larger size is one difference that cannot be so easily hidden, but I suppose if the difference is not too great it can be distracted away by a good imitation of chemical signals. And the ones that are very much larger than the ants -- and this one I find profoundly disturbing for some reason -- are actually shaped to resemble two ants, one following close behind the other!  Imagine there was a creature that was camouflaged to look like two humans spooning -- but only the front head was real;  the other was a mockup, with spots for eyes and a wrinkle for a mouth.  If ants could think (complex thoughts), that's how the ant-mimic might be for them.

A tangential anecdote: once a long time ago, I was walking up Westwood Boulevard toward the UCLA campus. It was near the medical center, so perhaps the man I saw coming toward me was an outpatient there, but anyway I have to say he was unfortunately saddled with -- forgive me! -- the most grotesque facial deformity I have ever seen; his face was so extremely wide that it looked as if during fetal development the head had started to grow and divide into two heads, but stopped part-way.  It did not look like an image of a normal face that was stretched equally overall to twice the width -- I think that would actually have been less weird-looking -- but more like a human version of a hammerhead shark's head, because each of his eyes was normal and located close to the correct spot for its side of the face, leaving a wide swath of vagueness between. I can't even imagine the kind of burden he must have had to live with, especially as a child.

Yet another possible reason is that being present yet unnoticed would allow us to flow through life's cracks without the onerous burden of having to deal with other people. For those who are shy or awkward (me included), the ability to vanish into the background would be like an armor over their sensitive thin skin. I certainly have on occasion wished I could disappear like a flounder on a chessboard. It's easy to say that this probably is not the most healthy, constructive way to resolve a social-adjustment problem, but what a boon such an ability would have been to that deformed man! And who is to say what is the best or the most 'correct' way to adjust? We tend to heroicize those who confront hardships and enemies directly and emerge triumphant (we often do this even if we are in principle in an adversarial relationship with them; for example, look at Genghis Khan and the ambiguously heroic image he enjoys in the west, despite the fact that had he lived to achieve his objectives, much of the population of Eastern Europe would have been decimated, and the rest would have been relegated to second-class status -- as actually happened to the Han Chinese in their own land after the Mongol conquest), but is the man who overcomes his enemies, putting up with toil and hardship in the process, necessarily superior to the man who cleverly manages to avoid difficulties (the ones who tend to be stereotyped as the villainous charmer in novels and movies)? As long as the effect of their lives on unconnected third parties is neutral, who is to say which is the superior way? What would Machiavelli say?