Nanjing, September 7 (Xinhua) -- A reporter learned from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that researchers at the Institute of Geology and Paleontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have discovered a fossil record of insect "camouflage" from Cretaceous Burmese amber 100 million years ago through artificial intelligence technology, including a strange class of mimetic plant behavior and a series of covering behaviors. The results of the research have been published online in the international journals Gondwana Studies and Historical Biology.
Wang Bo, a researcher at the Institute of Southern Antiquities of the Chinese Academy of Sciences who led the research, said that in nature, in order to avoid predators or catch prey more efficiently, many insects have strange "camouflage", including mimetic plants and cover camouflage. Mimetic plants refer to insects simulating plants in their living environment to achieve camouflage effects, and covering camouflage refers to insects actively using various materials in the environment to cover their bodies to camouflage themselves.
The mimetic plant insects found in this study belong to the orthoptera flea family, which is named Wang's leaf flea. From the morphological observation, the Wang leaf flea and the contemporaneous moss and cypress plants showed a high similarity, after measurement, the Wang leaf flea and the cypress and other plants are also extremely close in size, which further proves the mimic behavior of the Wang leaf flea.
Seven camouflage insects were also found, including 6 rodent insects and 1 hemiptera toad. Among them, the back of the toad insect is covered with a large amount of debris, including soil particles, grit and plant debris, etc., most likely using bristles on the back to stick the debris material on its back. The study also found that some insects had evolved the complex behavior of camouflage before the large radiation of flowering plants.
"Overburden behavior is a very peculiar and complex class of insect 'camouflage'. In the long geological history, due to the incompleteness of fossil preservation, people can only rely on naked eye observation and subjective judgment to determine the mimetic behavior in fossils, and lack quantitative analysis and judgment. Wang Bo said that through cooperation with Wuhan University, they applied twin neural networks for the first time to quantitatively analyze the mimetic behavior of insects in amber, which verified the mimic behavior of ancient insects and provided new 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. (End)