Like dry leaves or shapes of animals. How do they know what to mimic??
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They don’t know, and the ones that don’t do that also existed at some point, but they all got eaten. What you see is just the stuff that is currently working.
And to provide info that no one asked for: evolution and natural selection work on geological time scale, and the driving force are just random mutations that naturally happen. Tiny and random changes that happen across thousands or millions of generations of living creatures, and those with a favorable change survive to make babies that carry those genetic mutations, and those babies make more babies with more mutations over thousands of years. The accumulation of these tiny generational genetic mutations eventually give rise to all the
vastly different types of plants and animals you see today. And the common factor to all of these different species is that they’re “good enough” for their environment. You see, natural selection doesn’t mean nature “picks” the best traits and make more individuals carrying those traits, but rather the species randomly manifest a bunch of traits and nature just kills off all the ones that aren’t “good enough”.
Sometimes many different traits of a same species are all good enough, so they all live on and branch out – divergent (think of the Darwin’s finches), or certain traits are so good, that many different species that start manifesting that trait are all good enough and you see the opposite – a convergent (think of the species that all evolved into crabs).
To come back to the question, a leaf bug doesn’t just wake up and decide to look like a leaf, it’s the result of a long lineage of bugs that very slowly became more leaf-like over millions of generations, starting from a bug that mutated and became some % more leaf-like than it’s siblings, let’s say 1%, then it survived and made 100 buglets, and 1 of those mutated again to be 2% more leaf-like than the original bug, which made it 2% more likely to survive predation, and to make more leafy bug babies. Repeat this process for not just the appearance, but the anatomy and behavior, over millions of years, and you get a leafy ass bug that looks like a leaf, behave like a leaf, all the while having no say in the matter, unaware of it’s own leafiness, and if it’s good enough to survive to sexual maturity, it too will make leafy bug babies with teeny tiny mutations and the cycle continues
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