Compared with other animals, insects tend to be small and vulnerable, but they are the most diverse group in the animal kingdom. The reason is due to their various excellent "camouflage techniques". Let's explore how insects camouflaged themselves 100 million years ago.
Ecological restoration map of the camouflaged toad and its prey, Pseudomonas spp. The gray is the toad, and the green is the Pseudomonas (drawing/Yang Dinghua)
In the long geological history, how have all kinds of creatures evolved step by step from the initial "poor and two white" to today's "complex"? Biofossils provide important clues for us to explore the mysteries of life evolution. Amber, known as the "space-time capsule", preserves the evolutionary fragments of organisms in the geological history and is a powerful tool for exploring ancient times.
Scientists have discovered an amber biota in northern Myanmar dating back about 100 million years. The amber biota is famous for its ancient age and high biodiversity, and is known as one of the four largest amber biota in the world.
Burmese amber excavation site
Burmese amber is an important window for scientists to explore the tropical rainforest ecosystem in the Cretaceous period 100 million years ago, and contains a lot of key information on the evolution of various arthropods. And the protagonist of this article, the "pretender" 100 million years ago, is hidden in it.
As the well-known "camouflage masters" in the biological world, insects have evolved a variety of camouflage skills. By virtue of these skills, they can compete with natural enemies and prey to better survive in nature. For example, mimic behavior and cover camouflage behavior—the former refers to simulating other creatures and inorganic substances in the living environment to hide themselves, while the latter refers to using various materials in the environment to cover themselves to achieve the effect of camouflage. These superb camouflage techniques can not only help them avoid predators, but also make them master hunters.
In Burmese amber about 100 million years ago, scientists have found many cases of "pretenders" in the insect world. For example: Orthoptera (named Pseudomonas) that mimics plants, rodents that camouflage and cover camouflaged Hemiptera.
From the morphological observation, the protagonist of this paper, the protagonist of this paper, the scorpion, shows a very high similarity with the contemporaneous liverworts and selaginella plants. The leaflets are extremely similar; the hind leg segments are abnormally enlarged, which is very similar to the leaves of selaginella and other plants; the size of the leaf flea is also particularly close to that of the contemporaneous liverworts and selaginella plants.
At the same time, the researchers observed that the backs of the toads were covered with a large amount of debris, including soil particles, gravel and plant debris. And a large number of short bristles are found on the backs of these insects, which these insects most likely use to stick debris to their backs.
Simulating plant leaves can allow the slug toads to more effectively evade the fierce pursuit of their natural predators, the toads, while the toads' veil camouflage allows them to deceive their prey. It turns out that as early as 100 million years ago, "Infernal Affairs" had already been staged in nature.
In the past, researchers mostly used tools such as microscopes to explore the origin and evolution of insect camouflage skills. However, using the naked eye to observe and analyze the mimetic behavior of insects will implicitly add the subjective judgment of the researchers. In the latest study, researchers from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, used a new tool, the twin neural network, to quantitatively analyze mimic behavior during geological history.
Siamese neural network is a newly developed artificial intelligence analysis technology in recent years, which is widely used in image similarity measurement. This technology can extract multi-dimensional information that cannot be observed by the naked eye, and quantitatively calculate the similarity distance between different images, so as to objectively judge the similarity between different images. Sounds a lot like the Find the Difference game? With the help of this new tool, researchers can easily screen large numbers of specimens.
As early as 100 million years ago, tiny insects knew to camouflage and protect themselves in order to survive. Through various advanced technologies and means, researchers have given us the opportunity to approach them, understand them, and listen to their stories in another form. And with the rapid development of technology, we will surely hear more stories about the past in the future.
Pseudomonas (b: overall view; d: mid-leg segment and tibia; f: hind leg segment) and Selaginella (a, c: overall view; e: leaflet; g: leaf)
This is what insects actually look like in amber. Rodents (af) and Hemiptera (g, h) insects of the order Rodidae (af) and Hemiptera (g, h) of cover camouflage behavior
Amber is a kind of organic resin fossil formed after the resin is buried deep in the ground and undergoes chemical changes, in which air bubbles and insects or plant debris are often seen.
Since the Cambrian explosion of life, arthropods have been among the most successful animals on earth. Butterflies, crabs, centipedes, and spiders are all arthropods. This phylum accounts for about 80% of the species diversity in the animal kingdom today. Take Myanmar amber as an example. Up to now, at least 47 classes, 117 orders, 597 families and 1574 species have been found in Myanmar amber. Among them, the most preserved species are arthropods, with at least 1463 species.
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