You know, in general it’s called mimicry. But how does it work even though all these creatures only perceive their surroundings with the eyes and so on. Like…just how it knows the way these creatures should be changed to be less visible.
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It’s random. Some animals get born with random mutations that change how they look. It might make them look more like the environment, it might make them bright orange, it might make their heart explode and kill them. If **a random mutation happens to, by complete coincidence, make the animal look slightly more like the environment**, then that animal is less likely to be seen and eaten. In turn that means it’s more likely to survive and reproduce, passing on its altered appearance.
But isn’t a random mutation more likely to make an animal look less like the environment? Yes! And all those animals with random mutations making them stick out more are all more likely to be eaten, and therefore *less* likely to reproduce and pass on their appearance.
Over millions of years, where each individual that *just randomly happens to* look a little more like the environment has a slight survival advantage and slightly more offspring, then it adds up. The genetic lines that look more like the environment are favoured, those that are less camouflaged die out.
there’s a lot of survivorship bias here. Animals are so well adapted it looks like evolution must have known or planned their current shapes. But no, it’s totally random – the animals that exist today are the descendants of those who *just happened to* have a useful appearance. All the unlucky families that randomly mutated a less useful appearance have died out, leaving us with the descendants of the ones that happened to have more useful mutations.
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