Crypsis

I hunted them every summer. As sun crackled grass into burnished spines and the creeks condensed in gasps of steam, as the dirt hummed and churned with its prodigal fever, I sat on the cool concrete steps of my family’s old, old farmhouse and scoured the pink-frilled stems of flowering mint for devious, ingenious caterpillars.

From my earliest memories, summer was a season of generosity and madness. Nights echoed with the symphonies of spring peeper frogs, frenzied katydids, raucous calls and cheers from the rodeo on the next farm over. I would imagine the sparks of fireflies were paparazzi crouched in the dark curve of the valley. Next searing afternoon, I’d stalk through the shallows, startling garter snakes and prehistoric snapping turtles. It was the season of wild blackberries, luscious red wineberries, vast troves offering themselves along the semi-feral paths of our forests. The season of bones: deer antlers, fox skulls, anonymous tibia, smooth white jaws. Unspeakable treasures. I was an archaeologist, explorer, runaway, and wizard.

Bugs scurried and squirmed everywhere, too, no less exultant than I was. Fat hornworms bigger than my thumb, spined and gorging on our tomatoes. The red pinpricks of clover mites, crawling through the decayed labyrinths of pine needles. Ticks, lurking always in the long grasses, awaiting the careless aroma of blood. Spindled water striders waltzing over creek-skin, turbulent and enchanting, void of any physics. But those caterpillars, the ones I searched for—they had their own sort of magic. 

Look: here is a mint stalk. 

Green, slim, leaves slightly rough and serrated. Mint, Mentha, a Latinization of the Ancient Greek μίνθα, sprouting in turn from the Mycenaeans’ famously enigmatic Linear B: mi-ta. An old, old word. Ours was peppermint, one of twenty-odd poorly delineated species and hybrids, a botanist’s taxonomical nightmare. It grew in a tight fringe along the front steps, alongside tiger lilies and geraniums. I would pluck mint leaves and chew them in passing, relishing the crisp bite. It tasted clean and cold. But I wasn’t the only one who appreciated the flavor.

At first glance, you’d never see the caterpillars. If you lingered a moment longer, running the leaves between your fingers, your gaze might drift over the modest blush of the mint flowers. Here and there, a few of the close-packed blossoms would be brown, drying up. But only if you plucked those dead specks from the stem, studied them in your palm, would you find the caterpillars hiding underneath, the severed flowers adhered to their backs. If you stripped them of their fabulous disguises, they’d be pale and green, no longer than a fingernail or wider than a toothpick. 

Bugs simply weren’t supposed to be that clever.

I don’t remember the first time I discovered them, by chance. From then on, though, they fascinated me. How could such a small creature be so clever? A spider’s web or wasp’s nest was understandable—complex, to be sure, but entirely self-produced, plausibly reflexive. The caterpillars were doing something else entirely: synthesis. They grasped and designed, like artisans. From the mint flower’s cloth, they cut gowns to fool birds, mantises, spiders. At the same time, they softened the distinction between themselves and their surroundings. Rather than simply blending in by virtue of intrinsic coloration, they truly became the mint, even as they consumed it. For all my forest excursions, my muddied feet and grass-stained knees and thorn-kissed fingers, I could never complete the transformation that the caterpillars so gracefully achieved.

Now, I have a name for these tiny engineers. The camouflaged looper, Synchlora aerata, is the inchworm larva of the wavy-lined emerald moth. Of the roughly thirty-five thousand known inchworm species, many use camouflage to evade predators. But the looper is unique in its invention. As it turns out, their aptitude extends well beyond mint. Photographs show the camouflaged looper festooned in prairie clover buds, small bites of sunflower or black-eyed susan, even shreds of paper. Their adaptability allows them a much more varied diet than their relatives, unrestricted by their appearance. The looper, denuded, would be easy prey on a mint flower. In constructing their costumes, however, individuals can specialize, transcending the limits of species and genetics. Although I wouldn’t have been able to express it on those gleaming summer afternoons, searching the mint stems for pirated flowers, imposter inchworms, I was captivated by this transgression of roles. Bugs simply weren’t supposed to be that clever.

Something in design is irresistibly anthropomorphic, isn’t it? Something almost unnervingly sophisticated. After all, only two other invertebrates—the decorator crab and the green lacewing larva, the so-called “trash bug”—are known to construct costumes from their environment. Aberrations, not rules. Imitations of human ingenuity, not the real McCoy. We certainly like to think of ourselves as the architects of modern existence. If we have to concede that we didn’t actually create the natural world, too, we can at least remain its indisputable stewards, all the way back to the first divine marching orders of Genesis: “rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” With such foundations to the Western ethos, how can we resist grasping the world as if it is ours alone?

But between human synthesis and the camouflaged looper’s floral deception, the most important difference is proximity to the source of our creations. Turn back the clock ten or fifteen thousand years and humanity lived without refinement, in a literal sense. Tools and products alike were simple, unambiguous. Even up to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, most inventions put our surroundings to use without fundamentally changing their substrate. From the Industrial Revolution to today, however, we have set so many intervening transformations between ourselves and natural matter that many products are entirely unrecognizable in origin. Look at your smartphone, your jeans, your wristwatch. Where did it come from? What mine, what forest, what field? Let alone a car, a house. Complexity is contingent on obscurity. Material diversification carries us toward an event horizon of physical homelessness. We build things almost entirely foreign to the world that bore them, and these stages of mediacy let us pretend that the raw storehouse is infinite: the gargantuan engine of commerce and manufacture forever grinding on, ingesting fuel drawn up from only god knows where.

The looper, on the other hand, knows—in whatever deep way a caterpillar can know—what it’s doing. I challenge anyone to say otherwise, watching it studiously harvest its flowers, knitting a suit unique to its current home. Maybe the clear communion of that creation is nothing but a necessary result of relative simplicity. But I want to understand the looper’s mimicry in different terms. It lives in such close relation with its environment, its sustenance, that it begins to elide the very division between organism and world. This act—this magic trick, this slight of self—was what captivated me as a kid. It still does.

It would leave us stripped of agency, rob us of our holy mandate for dominion.

In his collection of essays on biology, The Phenomenon of Life, the twentieth-century German philosopher Hans Jonas argues that Darwin’s theory of evolution stretches the boundaries of life beyond the idealistic view of species as fixed and discrete forms. For millennia, Western intellectuals followed Aristotle’s lead. Each animal was an individual incarnation of a certain abstracted type. But as soon as science accepted the idea of natural selection, it made the environment an integral part of what life is. Through constant collision with surroundings, the full panoply of beings branches from shared ancestors. Now, as Jonas puts it, “organism is seen as primarily determined by the conditions of its existence, and life is understood in terms of the organism-environment situation rather than in terms of the exercise of an autonomous nature.”

In this endless conversation between and within self and other, the camouflaged looper is a striking example of the overall rule: exchange, metamorphosis. Nothing lives in solitude or constancy. What Jonas calls the “organism-environment” system is intricate, inescapable, mutually compromising. This, I think, is why our civilization holds such a deep dread of recognizing our own dependence on the rest of the universe, both animate and not. It would leave us stripped of agency, rob us of our holy mandate for dominion. Instead, we cloister ourselves behind artifice and glimmer. We rely on the same raw inventiveness as does the camouflaged looper, but for the opposite ends—false segregation rather than true synthesis. At our worst, we contrive our way out of responsibility or interrelation. And then, in chance moments of lucidity, we look up at the world we’ve created and find we hardly know what to do with it.

Let’s return to mint: home of my childhood’s inchworms, the subtending plant-cosmos they melded with so wonderfully. If you’ll recall our etymology, the Greeks called it μίνθα. But it wasn’t just an herb to them. Like so many of our ancient hand-me-downs, it comes wrapped up in a story. 

Once upon a time, Minthe was a naiad, a water spirit of the Cocytus, the mythical river of wailing bordering the realm of Hades. Her lover was the big guy himself: Hades, lord of the dead. But the queen of the underworld, the goddess Persephone, grew jealous of Minthe’s rendezvous with her husband. In vengeance, she transformed Minthe into the plant that would bear her name. In Greek pharmacology, the myth is inseparable from the mint leaf itself, explaining its connection to funerary rites and medicine. Centuries later, Ovid writes of Minthe in his Metamorphoses: “Was it once allowed to thee, Persephone, to change a maiden’s form to fragrant mint?”

That’s the strange power of myth, isn’t it? The infusion of physical reality with irresistible significance. Stories offer a way to break down the world into intelligible relations, to recontextualize ourselves in the greater fabric of beings again—if we’re willing to listen. Minthe is the parable of the camouflaged looper told on the human, or rather divine, scale. She’s what we all might dare to be: a visceral remaking, not as punishment but as transcendence. What if we, too, were leaves and stems, warm soil, bright petals? What if we pretended to be more than merely human, until we convinced ourselves? Until we remembered that it might even be true?

I still think about those endless days running through the forest. The deer paths and mossy logs are etched into me. If I was learning anything, it was an alternative to mechanistic severance. Climbing trees, flipping stones, picking fruit: bone-deep lessons in proximity. I saw the caterpillars donning their flowers and thought: I wish I could be like that, too.

In a 2017 interview with David Naimon, the renowned science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin warned of our growing alienation from other animals and plants: “Children grow up never touching any living being except another human being,” she said. “We can live in cities as if there were no other living beings on Earth.” This profound isolation leads us to extract and annihilate while hardly noticing the losses we, too, suffer. It lets us deny the totality of our environment, our world—which, Jonas might well remind us, is equally to deny ourselves. How lonely is the species that forgets this.

Yet we still carry the stories of communion, of wilder ways of living. Fables buried like seeds, waiting to flourish. Minthe calls to us from her garden beds, her fallow fields and bursting meadows. She ambushes me beside the steps to my family’s farmhouse. She offers herself as a guide, an insistent interrogator, embodying the old, old bonds we have tried so hard to escape.

Look closer: Her summer crown of flowers, pink and daring.

And beneath the flowers, camouflaged loopers quietly remaking themselves in her image. The ancient miracle of her metamorphosis, ever continued; pouring life into life into life, without limit or distinction, without reason or end.