A Woman's a Two-Face
When Inna and I visited Tiger Kingdom in Phuket, I mentioned to her that I’d never known that tigers have white spots on the back of their ears, and wondered what the heck that was about. I didn’t ask the keepers, and never learned the reason until a couple days ago, when I came across this photograph of a tiger bending low to get a drink of water.
Look carefully, and you’ll see something truly remarkable. Those white spots on her ears look remarkably like a pair of angry eyes. And if you extend that illusion, you will see the ladder of black stripes on top of her skull suddenly transform into the wrinkles along the muzzle of an angry beast, and the pointed white spots above her eyes become a fearsome set of bared fangs!
So while the real tiger is bending low in a vulnerable position, the pattern of coloring on her fur projects the illusion of a fierce and angry predator. It’s an amazing adaptation, made even more effective because the illusory tiger’s features are more pronounced-and therefore more prominent-than the real ones!
When I first saw this, I thought, “Wow, nature is pretty amazing to craft something that sophisticated from spontaneous natural selection. But then I took a step back, asking myself how could the mechanics of evolution possibly produce this? Tigers are an apex predator with little need for such camouflage; they have absolutely no predators except other tigers and man, and humans haven’t held mastery over tigers long enough to have that dramatic an impact on their evolution. So how could natural selection have produced such a coloring trait?
To be honest, I have no idea, which makes it that much more astonishing an illusion.