I saw pictures of a praying mantis, that was supposed to look like a leaf. It was scary how accurate it resembled a green leaf. How does the DNA of a bug, know what a leaf looks like?
In: Biology
The other answers all are great, but I’d like to add the concept of coevolution, wherein two species affect each other’s evolution. With the example of the insects that have slowly evolved to produce very convincing leaf-like appearances, the other side of the coin is that the eyesight of the animals that eat them, mostly birds, has also improved.
Since the birds with worse eyesight could not spot the difference between leaves and leaf-like insects, they would die out of starvation, making the birds with better eyesight survive, and create offspring with very good eyesight, and so on as bugs evolved at the same time to be more realistic and therefore even harder to distinguish.
This has created mutual evolutionary pressure which has caused the bugs to be so incredibly camouflaged; after all, if the birds didn’t keep getting better and better eyesight, then there technically wouldn’t have been a reason for the bugs to eventually become THAT hidden.
Edit: grammar
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