We all know from early childhood the fairy tale about the wolf and the seven goats, in which the wolf deceives the goats by pretending to be a goat. But can animals really pretend to be each other, and if so, which ones and for what purpose? And who (or maybe what?) are they pretending to be? Let's try to figure it out.
Many people have probably already guessed that the most common reason for pretending is to scare larger animals and humans.
This is often done by some insects that aren't actually scary at all. In the same way, some safe little insects have taken the example of brightly colored poisonous relatives, and now scare away enemies (e.g.,
birds) with the same bright coloration.
For example, buzz flies look very similar to wasps. They have even learned to tuck their legs as if they were whiskers and retract their abdomen as if they were trying to sting. Some of them are furry, like
a bee or a bumblebee. Some butterflies, such as the glasswort, behave similarly.
If someone scares a
octopus, it manages to pretend to be a sea snake. Many animals can do something similar. For example, there's a caterpillar butterfly that lives in South America whose caterpillars also pretend to be snakes. They can inflate themselves like snake heads. Other butterflies have "eyes" on their wings for the same purpose.
But the small birds from South America, the gray aulias, excel at this: as babies they can pretend to be brightly colored, furry, poisonous caterpillars; they not only look but move like caterpillars.
The flies that the jumping spider feeds on have learned to pretend to be...its enemy. When a skink sees such a fake spider, it thinks the territory is occupied and leaves... But
ants are much less fortunate in this regard. One of their main enemies is the ant spider, so named for the fact that it can pretend to be an ant! When it approaches an anthill, it starts moving on six legs, and the fourth pair of legs it presses against its head, and holds them so that they become like ant whiskers!
Once inside the anthill, the spider quickly kills one of its inhabitants and carries the dead one out of the anthill, just as ants do with their dead companions. After moving away with its prey to a safe distance, it sucks the juices out of the victim, as spiders are supposed to do. This behavior of the spider has another reason: it helps it escape from animals that feed on
spiders. So, thanks to its peculiarity, it fails at these things - getting food and not becoming food itself - much less often.
But pretending, and copying other animals can be done in different ways - some copy a sight, some copy a sound, and even...a smell! So some gophers chew on the dropped snake skin to get the snake smell! It turns out that in nature there are animals much more cunning and insidious than
wolf.