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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These creatures don’t *choose* to look this way, it’s evolution.
Basically take creature A, some random bug. A new bird moves to town that *loves* to eat this bug. One day a baby creature A kind of sort of looks a bit flatter, a bit more like leaf. The bird doesn’t see it at first and eats some other creature A. Creature A’s babies all look flatish too. Over time, if this repeats basically only Creature A’s babies survive and now all of that bug look like leaves, the rest were eaten by birds. The creature doesn’t know it looks like a leaf, it doesn’t know what a leaf is and it might not even know what a bird is. It just goes about’s life and survives.
Another example of how this might work is imagine there is a blight on the tree that Creature A looks like the leaf of. Suddenly there are no more of those leaves and suddenly they really stand out, suddenly it’s open season on Creature A’s leaf family. Then Creature B is born, which is a mutated Creature A that looks like a slightly different type of leaf. *That* new creature survives. Maybe all the Creature A’s die out, or maybe they all only survive in a random forest untouched by the blight. Now you have Creature A *and* Creature B living at the same time apart from each other, that’s the creation of a new species.
This process as I’ve simply described it is the basics of what we’d now call “Darwinian Evolution”, it’s not perfect for describing everything in nature but it forms the basic thesis of how evolution works. I recommend picking up “On the Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin if you’re interested.
Similarly you can have something called “Convergent Evolution” where something is so wildly useful random animals all start doing it too. For example octopodes and chameleons developing color changing skin – they aren’t *related* to each other, they didn’t share a color changing ancestor. They just both independently discovered that’s pretty nifty.
Another similar example is called “carcinisation”, or “looking like a crab”. Basically being crab shaped is so wildly useful as a body form tons and tons of animals around the planet ended up looking like crabs. Not saying they are related, it’s just that many creatures all discovered that being crab shaped is super useful.
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