This is some Pokemon shit.
Just a fellow creature. Nothing suspicious here. snacks please.
“You get free food for life but you gotta wear this giant yellow foam cowboy hat and never take it off. Even to shower”
It’s wild that the benefits of this outweigh the cost of making it enough to stick around.
Disguise skill level: Agent 47
That must have been such a wild evolutionary arms race. I wonder how it even began.
What do you mean? We’re watching it happen in real time right now with people; vtubers learned to put on costumes of animals, insects or even mythical creatures to get weird internet losers to give them money to feed themselves.
You also have that giant cockroach that learned to put on a human skin called asmongold to get people to subscribe to its twitch channel.
I’m not saying I’ve never covered myself in feathers and sat naked in a tree waiting for birds to feed me. I’m not perfect, no one is, we’re all on a journey of learning and improving. Growing a termite on your back just seems like it’d take so long before it would trick the termites.
says a lot of how insects identify each other
Yes, that’s what I wondered, too. In ant nest parasites they usually are visually very different from the ants, but get the pheromones right. In this example here, visual clues have to be important for the beetle to have evolved such a sophisticated mimicry.
Who is this Mimi which is crying?
