It's not all about us

Just as when an Io moth spreads its wings to terrify avian predators (left), there's nothing more terrifying to feline prey species than Baby himself.

We just stumbled onto something huge this afternoon in an everyday imail chat with our beloved sis. Taking our cue from the awesome, out-of-the-box thinker Tuck for our previous post yesterday, we turned the image of an Io moth (above left) upside down and found it way more terrifying to our own human eye (below left).

But now our sis blindsides us with her take:

She:  I see something different . . . the upsidedown moth [above left] looks too cute and wide-eyed . . . like a baby.

We: LOL. YOU are human, and we are wired to see big-eyed fuzzy things as cute. Not so the bird, who unaccountably finds gaping little beaks pecking at their orange spot adorable.

She: If the moths looked more threatening upside down, I'm sure Mother Nature would have adjusted her plan.

We: You are being only human again. It would depend entirely upon which direction the bird was flying as to which was "up" or "down."

And there you are. The upside, downside thing is nothing more nor less than a human construct, the left-right, up-down thing of our wonderful Western mounted-insect-display case:

We'd never thought about it until today, but our reasonable -- to use our beloved Papa Ratzi's term -- way of mounting biological specimens is always with their heads up. (Texas A&M University Insect Collection photo)

We just realized this afternoon that we are so conditioned to view insects with their heads upside and their tails downside that we got it all wrong about how a predator might approach a butterfly or moth.

Comments

[hnav]

i sometimes feel upside down...

fascinating expession Ms. Miller...

simply wonderful