Foolish Design

Caterpillars are Foolish Creatures to begin with. Apparently, they save up all of their ugliness for their first stage of life, and then stick with being glamorous butterflies after they leave their cocoons.

For the Large Blue Butterfly, the strangeness doesn't stop there. Apparently, as a caterpillar, the Large Blue Butterfly masks itself in the chemical scent of other ants, and then ensures that it gets escorted back into their hive. Once in the hive, the caterpillar blissfully starts munching away at everything in the nest, including the ants themselves. Over a period of about a year (two if the caterpillar rations its delicious ants), the caterpillar grows immensely, and then even spins its cocoon under the protection of the ant colony.

Finally, the Large Blue Butterfly emerges, leaving what's left of the colony to wonder what exactly just happened.

Navigating a maze, especially when you're trapped inside of it, can be a complicated situation. Scientists researching intelligence have recently found that droplets of oil can mimic the intelligence by successfully traversing a maze. It turns out that the droplet's uncanny ability to navigate the maze arises not out of any internal intelligence, but rather the highly ordered chemical structure of the maze around it. Thus, even though the droplet appears to be highly intelligent, it is really just following a highly ordered pathway.

This brings up the fascinating idea that being smart could merely be a symptom of having a highly ordered brain. How Foolish.

Panic has always been something of a mystery. In an evolutionary sense, it's strange that thrashing your arms and legs around randomly would be a good behavior to learn. Strangely enough, it turns out that such Foolish Behavior could actually be helpful in the real world.

Apparently, scientists training a robot to walk in different ways using a neural network have found that panic can be helpful to get that robot out of sticky situations, particularly when one of its legs gets stuck. Whether panic in humans is some sort of evolutionary hold-over, or the joke of a Foolish Creator, remains to be seen.

The octopus is a particularly Foolish creature, known for a variety of Foolish behaviors including imitating fish, walking creepily on two legs, and generally confusing humanity.

Looks like these creatures just earned another badge for being insanely smart, because someone has finally recorded a video of an octopus using coconut shells to form a makeshift, portable home.