People's Daily Beijing, August 20 (Zhao Zhuqing) In nature, many animals have evolved magical "camouflage" to help them avoid predators or catch prey. Mimesis is one of the more common ones, such as stick insect mimetic branches, ant mimetic leaves, etc. According to the official website of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xu Chunpeng, a doctoral student at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology of the Academy of Sciences, under the guidance of researcher Wang Bo, cooperated with Professor Cui Xiaohui of Wuhan University and graduate student Fan Li to discover a strange class of insect mimetic plants and a series of fossil records of insect covering behavior in Cretaceous Burmese amber 100 million years ago. The study reported records of the leaves of the first orthoptera mimetic plant in the Mesozoic Era, as well as the oldest record of cover behavior of insects of the order Rodentia and Hemiptera toads. The results were recently published online in Gondwana Research and Historical Biology.
According to reports, the study for the first time applied twin neural networks to quantitatively analyze the mimetic behavior of geological historical periods, and provided a set of preliminary quantitative judgment models and methods. Twin neural networks are newly developed artificial intelligence analysis techniques in recent years and are widely used in image similarity measurement. It mainly uses the idea of confrontation, each time entering a pair of pictures, so that the algorithm-optimized target and similar image pairs are less distant, and the distance between different image pairs is larger. Twin neural networks can also extract multidimensional information that cannot be observed by the naked eye, thereby quantifying the semantic distance between different pictures. From this, it is possible to quantitatively calculate the value of the inconsistency between different images, so as to objectively judge the similarity between different images.
Leaf-like fleas (b: overall diagram, d: midfoot leg and tibia, f: hindfoot leg segment) and cypresses (a, c: overall diagram, e: leaflet, g: leaflet). Source: Official website of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Cladding camouflage behavior of rodents (a-f) and hemiptera toads (g, h) insects. Source: Official website of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Ecological restoration map of pseudophylla flea (drawn by Yang Dinghua). Source: Official website of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Author: Zhao Zhuqing
Source: People's Daily News