Animal Influence I - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

leaf serving as an incitement to cannibalism in this
particular kind of totemic feast.”[vi]
Caillois wrote about mimicry in terms of the
“veritable lure of space” and believed that the
mimic was suffering from a disordered sense of
space—a disintegration of the personality’s sense
of where it was in space, concurrent with an
assimilation to that particular space.[vii] He drew
on accounts of legendary “psychasthenia,” or
“depersonalization through assimilation into
space,” in which “the body and the mind
become dissociated; the subject crosses the
boundary of his (sic) own skin and stands outside
of his senses. … he feels that he is turning into
space himself—dark space into which things
cannot be put.”[viii] An intriguing, imaginative and
non-anthropocentric theory for its time. I
appreciate that Caillois assumes insects have a
perspectival point of view that they abandon in
what he presents as a psychotic state. Still, I can’t
help but wonder why he assumed that mimicry
was the manifestation of a pathological
problem.[ix] Mimicry could just as easily be a form
of environmental playfulness, a creature
experimenting with space and colour, or moving,
pushing, expanding its embodied knowledge
beyond its own skin into its lived relations with the
environs.
Camouflage usually involves visual
mimicry, vis-à-vis adaptations in morphology,
colouring and behavior; but mimicry can also
include variations in olfaction, taste, or hearing,
and probably other senses we don’t have any
idea about. Marine biologist, Roger Hanlon
marvels at how octopuses camouflage
themselves against diverse backgrounds, and
wonders how they pick the best pattern and
coloring from their overall repertoire. Not only that,
how does an octopus, as Hanlon observed, in the
span of a mere 2.02 seconds, go from fully
camouflaged to completely conspicuous? With
insight, Hanlon comments: “The subtle ways in
which edges, shadows, outlines, patterns, colors,
contrast and papillae are used by animals for
camouflage or communication also seems to
have much in common with art, photography,
landscape architecture and related fields,
because light and dimensionality are being
manipulated in similar fashion.”[x] The profusion
and widespread distribution of diverse forms of
mimicry reinforces the fascinating world of
adaptation across species in nature. For eons, in
the fields of art and biomimicry, human beings
have been observing and mimicking other animal
species.
Mimicry in evolutionary ecology is called a
mimicry complex, which typically involves a
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mimic, a model and a dupe. After that, it is a
free-for-all: mimics may change models hourly,
daily, or during different times of their life; and
there is collective mimicry where several
individuals cooperate to mimic one organism.
The numerous, known types of mimicry are
named after the people who studied and thought
about them (i.e. Bates, Mertens, Vavilov, Brower
etc.). We have, for example, Batesian mimicry—
named after Henry Walter Bates, an English
naturalist and butterfly expert. Basically, Batesian
mimicry is when a harmless creature (Viceroy
butterfly) poses as harmful or, in this case,
unpalatable or noxious (Monarch butterfly). My
favourites include Vavilovian and collective
mimicry. Vavilovian mimicry—named after the
Russian botanist, Nikolai Vavilov, is a form of
defensive mimicry. Vavilov’s case in point is the
way some weeds come to resemble crops, so
they won’t be “weeded out.” Rye, for example, is
a secondary crop, a weed that originally
mimicked wheat, wasn’t “weeded out” and
eventually became a domesticated crop. In
1955, Knepper described a fascinating example
of collective mimicry involving a catfish, (Plotosus
anguillaris). He observed approximately 28 mm
long juveniles of this dark catfish arranging
themselves in a radially symmetrical mass with
their heads pointed outward. In this dynamic
formation they closely resembled a neighbouring,
poisonous, black sea anemone with waving
tentacles. Apart from mimicking the dangerous
sea anemone, these young fish may gain further
protection by presenting their venomous spines
“en mass” to an enemy.[xi] I sometimes wonder
how much collective mimicry is missed by agents
immersed in neo/liberal pursuits of unsullied
individualism.
These fish cooperate in a mimicking set of
actions (not normally part of their daily repertoire)
to protect themselves. They have a perspective
on their own bodies, fellow bodies and dangerous
bodies around them; they locate themselves in
relation to these other bodies and act in their
world. Do they occupy a perspectival point of
view? How could they not and yet act so?
Most of the known mimics are insects,
closely followed by fish. The marine world is full of
complex environments, awash with fluidity,
suspension and distortion of visions. I similarly
situate myself in a watery world of material,
feminist post-humanism. Being partial to Elizabeth
Grosz’s reading of Darwin and evolutionary theory,
I concur with her focus on the fundamental
indetermination of Life processes through chance
and natural selection. Grosz writes that: