Confusion and Obfustication.... and Nature's digital art.

What does the Passenger want you to see...
Well, perhaps it is easier to say what it doesn't want you to see....
it, and all the other wonderfully patterned moths, don't want you to see a potential meal!!
Save those like the Tigers, the Cinnabar and other very brightly coloured insects...
they, apparently, are saying "Don't eat me, I'm yucky!"
No, I've not tried!!!
But these, whilst often seen in flight during the day, are few in number.

The vast majority of moths are resting at that time and only flying at night.
So they need to remain unseen...
the most well known of these was the Peppered Moth [Biston betularia]... often cited as "evolution in action"*...
where...int'Black Country and t'grime of t'far North'n cities with the mills and steelworks...
a dark form evolved... and thrived... because it couldn't be seen at rest.
And, now, with the "big clean up", it has become much rarer.

Everyone knows the Buff-Tip... which tries to make us think that it is a broken birch twig....

Here, it is actually on a broken willow branch....
so it isn't restricted in its choice of places to rest!

and the Lappet, in silhouette in the previous post, even has "leaf veins"!

The leaf veins are showing very well on the lower wing of this one.

But what is the Passenger trying to imitate?
As a moth, it is a very "flat-winged" one...

It is a very delta-winged moth.

but, by "posing" in a nose downward position, it is imitating a curled over, dead leaf.
A total optical illusion... but very effective... all the insect needs to do is keep its tail towards the sun...
et, voila...
it is a dead leaf.

Not one of my best pix....
but I had released it well before looking at it onscreen...
and spotting the illusion.

And it is all done with pixels...
nature invented digital art before computers were even a Greek dream!

And here are the pixels!!

*Personally, with the Peppered Moth, my take is that a dark form had always existed!
Many moths have dark forms... given the right conditions, they will be more successful...
simply because they are the least likely to be picked off as a tasty snack

Spinning on a branch!!

Sometimes book illustrations get it so wrong...
whilst being "right and proper"....
moths are one example...
illustrations of the waterside plant Butterburr [Petasites hybridus] Chapeau-du-Diable being another.... it always has tiny holes in the leaves caused by the Strawberry Snail [Trichia striolata] that feeds under the leaves. Artists have always "cleaned" the leaves when they paint illustrations for books.

A Lobster Moth [Stauropus fagi] fr... on a rendered wall... in normal, and book, position.

All moths are portrayed heads-up or from the side....
to show the underwing, quite often the moth is pictured with one pair open....
usually the right... and so it should be, you need to be shown the characteristics...
but they are always a bit "museum"!
Possibly because museum specimens were used to do the drawings??
But, possibly also, because that is the "norm"!

But on websites, I have noticed that the photographs are also quite often corrected...
the moth doesn't actually adopt the position shown in the books... but the picture's editor....
possibly the photographer... possibly the website owner[s]...
have orientated the moth to the book position.
You don't actually find the moth in that position...
and the direction of light shows it has been rotated.

An "almost-silhouette" of a Lappet...
showing the leaf outline... not the right plant...
but it chose to fly off and settle there!!

Take the moth at the beginning of this post...
The Passenger [Dysgonia algira] la Passagère...
a moth new to me... but a beautiful example of evolution.
I rotated the first picture to the "book" position.
BUT... this is how it was in the trap...

And a better picture taken later...

And this is the position it immediately adopted on release back to the wild...

... in both cases, as in the trap, head down.
But can you see why?
Let your eyes relax a little and look at those last few pictures...
can you see the optical illusion?
Remember that the moth is a flat-winged creature...
the illusion is created in "pixels"... each wing scale being a "pixel"....!!

I'll post later about what evolution "thinks" you should be seeing.