Butterflies use optical illusions to dodge predators

50 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by gmays

11 Comments

lopis

4 hours ago

I don't understand articles that are completely about a piece of media, but don't show or link to any piece of said media. This article cannot be effective without a video.

Utilera

3 hours ago

Even a 10-second slow-motion clip would probably explain the result better than half the article

Utilera

3 hours ago

What I like about this is that the camouflage isn't really in the pattern itself, but in the interaction between the pattern, the wing deformation, and the predator's visual system.

scun

10 hours ago

Sounds like the ol' razzle dazzle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage

schiffern

41 minutes ago

Is this (in effect) "flood the zone" for certain targeted information theoretic chokepoints within the visual processing system? Similar to false cockpits on planes, you're adversarially and intentionally creating additional visual processing work?

PS, still a great musical...

yathern

10 hours ago

> The team combined multiple lines of evidence. They used a high-speed camera to film real butterflies taking off at over 1,000 frames per second to capture how their patterns behave in flight, as seen through the eyes of a bird.

> To test how patterns affected real attacks, 100 volunteers acted as “predators”, trying to catch virtual butterflies on a touchscreen.

This sounds fascinating, and I'd love to see footage demonstrating the barber-pole effect. If that's not available, I'd alternatively love to see footage of volunteers trying to tap butterflies on an iPad.

Utilera

3 hours ago

The description is interesting enough that it almost feels incomplete without the video

isolay

4 hours ago

Well, what the kids don’t learn in biology class, they can still learn on HN.

esalman

6 hours ago

This weekend while cleaning dry leaves in our backyard we discovered a large moth. We all mistook it fot another dry leaf until it started fluttering. Fabulous stuff.

anthk

10 hours ago

This is Micheal Levin-level mind blowing. His theory can be shortened to "there's intelligence in really small discrete parts of Biological entities".

suddenlybananas

an hour ago

How is that different from just saying "evolutionary adaptive changes can seem clever".