Credit: Kathleen Scavone
I happened upon a spring green insect that was hidden in the geranium leaves. It’s an angle-wing katydid, Microcentrum rhombifolium. These unique two-and-a-half-inch creatures create a metronome-like ticking sound. The tick-tick-tick is a quiet sound generated by the male to ‘advertise’ himself to the female of the species. If she hears the love call, she’ll respond with her own version of the ticking sound. Katydids, related to crickets, hear sound via slits in their front legs! Around 74 species of katydids live in California. Most katydids eat leaves, but not enough to harm the plant. If you get a chance, look up the Lichen kaydid that is found in Central and South America. What a fascinating master of disguise that insect is, to allow it to blend magically into its surroundings, looking exactly like lichen!
The art and science of hiddenness in nature is a built-in preservation device. There are countless mimicry techniques employed by plants and animals to hide them from harm’s way. Around the world and across time, spiders mimic animal scat, Pacific tree frogs alter their color to hide in plain sight, and numerous owls and other avian species hide in a shelter or just plain blend into their surroundings.
Animals also use camouflage to trick their prey so that they may sneak up on prey. Don’t get me started on undersea creatures and their uncanny methods of hiding. Some intelligent species can mimic shape, use color to blend in with their surroundings, or even resemble plants such as kelp to render them almost invisible.
Camouflage for some critters, such as the chameleon, occurs in mere seconds. It only takes a chameleon about 30 seconds to activate its special skin cells called dermal chromatophores. There are many other animals that are masters of disguise.
In her book Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, Jane Hirshfield explains that most life on Earth uses being hidden as a default mechanism since being visible can often cost lives. Hirshfield mentions other kinds of hiddenness in nature, such as the salt that is hidden within the ocean’s waters. Within her book, the meaning of the word hidden transforms itself to elucidate the ways that a poem can hide meanings within itself. For example, the meaning can be hidden in a metaphor. She stretches our imaginations by describing the many poetic meanings we can see or feel or that are sometimes hard to decipher, but, boy, when we find them, it’s a treasure! Speaking of literary lessons of hidden treasure, consider the common mystery thriller and how the explanation or solution to the genre is often hidden, where you cannot see it.
Within nature and literature, concealment is often key. The answer to survival is the ability of fauna to hide, blend in, or change color. What a superpower!
