As warned in part one, my friends, we have barely scraped the surface of the power of our animal cousins’ abilities to masquerade as something they’re definitely not...bird poo, rocks, etc.
Here, now, is a further list of near-unbelievable and peculiar transformations that animals can pull off and do for fun, profit, or even sexy time.
You are a bug. You live in Tanzania, Malaysia, and other isolated bits of eastern Africa. Life is already tenuous and challenging. Then unexpectedly, you are walking down a branch, and bam, a massive blob of your dead friends is trundling along in a nightmarish globule. Viola, the assassin bug. Is it camouflage or just a piece of grotesque mockery of nature? Who can say? Not all assassin bugs use this technique; only Acanthepsis petax—the insect version of a horror movie’s murderous villain who feeds on your fear. These assassin bug nymphs must first catch their prey, at which point they inject them with digestive juices and suck the delicious slurry within, leaving only an exoskeleton that they then heap onto their carcass mound. The exact purpose of this grotesque collection remains somewhat unclear, but leaving ants with traumatic memories has to be number one.
The Potoo is a neo-tropical bird whose various species range from forests to savannas, urban areas, and mangroves. Its haunting call and ugly cute visage have become the stuff of interwebs legend. Nevertheless, their profound ability to blend in with tree bark, dusty landscapes, and weird fuckin’ aliens with giant bulging eyes is unparalleled. Their only distinguishing features are a terrifying, gaping maw, a nightmarish call, and the tendency to look like their head’s split in twain, just for fun...
If you find a Potoo in the wild, you should either stop to make a slick TikTok of it or, more reasonably, flee to avoid the all-consuming fire of Hell.
Amanita phalloides is a mushroom that has a long and fantastic history of disaster here in the PNW. There are some look-alikes who, if you were slightly more incautious (aka punk rock), you’d be straight-up dead in a few bites. Amanita phalloides is extra fun because, from all accounts, it’s quite delicious—and you really don’t notice anything is wrong until major organ failure is en route, so that’s nifty. Most people who consume this fungus confuse it for a common field mushroom—and in all fairness, it’s quite plain...white cap, gills, and stem. In so many ways, it can seem un-extraordinary—it looks like a hundred other mushrooms, that is, right up until the doctors pull the plug on your life support. LOL, U DIED.
Not to be fuckin’ topical here, but in the early ’90s, I had a friend whose dad worked in tech and had the earliest, stupidest version of AI. It refused to engage if you even said a single bad word. If your questions were any less than completely direct, it pulled its trousers down and showed you its arse. Last week I asked ChatGPT to write me an article in my own vein and was left feeling damn near useless. Camouflage is a term that fairly covers this new topic, and damned if it isn’t tough. Maybe I’m outdated here—perhaps we all are. For those that have avoided it, I’d recommend a trial run, if for nothing other than morbid curiosity.
More invertebrates! Geez, this one’s tough because I love arachnida and mimicry. Nature is gonna nature, though—it may well adhere to both, but spiders FTW. Crab spiders have learned to mimic damn near any flower because...for sure, someone is gonna pop by and be careless. Bloodlust satisfied.
Esmeralda Rupp-Spangle is half alive. She can be found on Facebook as Esmeralda Marina or Instagram as @EsmeraldaSilentCitadelif you feel the need to hurl fan letters at her.