Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- This is Micheal Levin-level mind blowing. His theory can be shortened to "there's intelligence in really small discrete parts of Biological entities".by anthk
- This weekend while cleaning dry leaves in our backyard we discovered a large moth. We all mistook it fot another dry leaf until it started fluttering. Fabulous stuff.by esalman
- Well, what the kids don’t learn in biology class, they can still learn on HN.by isolay
- A rabbit's high-contrast cottontail serves a similar purpose.
Predators focus on the tail but as the body turns, the tail very briefly appears to continue in the same direction or momentarily disappears. The predator is forced to constantly refocus, creating lots of opportunities for them to make a mistake.
by SaintGhurka - > The team combined multiple lines of evidence. They used a high-speed camera to film real butterflies taking off at over 1,000 frames per second to capture how their patterns behave in flight, as seen through the eyes of a bird.
> To test how patterns affected real attacks, 100 volunteers acted as “predators”, trying to catch virtual butterflies on a touchscreen.
This sounds fascinating, and I'd love to see footage demonstrating the barber-pole effect. If that's not available, I'd alternatively love to see footage of volunteers trying to tap butterflies on an iPad.
by yathern - What I like about this is that the camouflage isn't really in the pattern itself, but in the interaction between the pattern, the wing deformation, and the predator's visual system.by Utilera
- Sounds like the ol' razzle dazzleby scun
- I don't understand articles that are completely about a piece of media, but don't show or link to any piece of said media. This article cannot be effective without a video.by lopis