Photo: Insect Camouflage

What is the connection between insect color and writer Rudyard Kipling?

I nearly didn’t notice this insect as I was sipping my evening coffee.

The rust, black, and white pattern of the insect blends into the pink feldspar, biotite, and quartz of the granite table top. When the restaurant introduced these tables in the 1980’s, insects with a passing resemblance to the table colors survived the gaze of bird predators better than individuals of the same species not having that coloration. Granite colored insects reproduced more, and the match between the insect patterning and the table top became more fine tuned over time.

I made this up. It is what is known as a “Just So Story”, named after writer Rudyard Kipling’ s Just So Stories for children. Kipling wrote imaginative fantastical explanations for how animals looked the way they do. The term made its way into biology and was especially used, rather derisively, by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould as a critique of evolutionary psychology. Gould complained that the field tends to come up with imaginative yet unsupported adaptationist explanations for every aspect of human behavior. They are Just So Stories. The criticism has extended to other areas of biology too. Such as one can make about my story of the insect.

How did this particular insect species get this coloration that matches the granite? Likely, its historical origins lies in a very different environment. Perhaps adaptation through natural selection in an ecologic setting of leaves and colored pebbles did play a role in the evolution of this pattern. Or perhaps it is a side effect of some other developmental changes in the insect body plan. Whatever the explanation, it is only chance that its coloration matches the table top stone.