The Moth and the Firewood

If you are not into reading very loosely arranged thoughts around things slightly philosophical with very little real world application and no substantial education behind it – skip the post and wait for the next round of photos. 

Most of my posts are based on photos or news. This one, just a few thoughts around something I noticed on the last trip away with the family. It got stuck in the back of my head for the last few weeks. So I used the time away in the bush to think it through.

As the title indicates it all started with a moth.

On the Saturday morning after our early morning walk, staying at the Bombah cottages in the beautiful Mayall Lakes area, I was making a cup of coffee in the kitchen. I saw on the kitchen bench the most amazing little insect. It looked, at a glance, like an actual piece of bark from a tree. By closer inspection, simply because I am curious at nature, I discovered that it was actually a moth disguised as a piece of bark.

After closely inspecting it for a few minutes I was amazed at the detail in its cloak of deception and I could not stop wondering how it came about. Surely the moth could not have simply decided one day to start looking like a piece of bark so that it would give him an advantage over his natural predators. That would indicate the ability to think, number one and secondly it would indicate that the moth had the ability to alter itself genetically overnight. As we know neither of these two characteristics can be attributed to a simple moth.

The moth is a simple insect driven by instinct. No sense of reason or plans for the future.  So how did it get to where it is? Such a sophisticated living thing at the pinnacle of its physical being. Physically deformed or changed to look like a piece of wood. Does it even know what a tree is and yet its entire physical body is dedicated to looking like it.

My theory: It has no idea it even looks like that. It never tried to look like that. It simply does.

The moth is a species that evolve relative quickly compared to other living things we know because they come into the world in vast numbers and live relative short lives. This points to natural selection that is responsible for the success of one moth over another simply because they look slightly different. One was born looking a little more brown compared to the others and survived. It had 10 000 children. Most of them had a similar physical characteristic (the colour) and some even more so than the original father as is the random nature of nature.

Nature provided 10 000 options and the environment eliminated all but a few. In their generation the same thing happened and so on through the generations the natural predators killed off any of the moths that looked like moths and the ones looking like something else, like a piece of bark or a leaf , even if it was purely by chance, survives to live and breed on. So it is that you end up with this highly evolved specimen of a species, physically shaped by its environment simply because of its omission as part of the natural food chain because of its looks.

The moth probably not even aware of why it looks the way it does or why it survived and it’s brothers and sisters didn’t. Now that I am here in the thought process I have to go back and revisit 2 of my original assumptions:

1. The Moth can’t think  ” I want to look like that because I’ll survive if I do ”
2. The Moth has no ability to influence any of its physical characteristics.

If the first was not true and the moth was indeed self aware and had the ability to think and could wish to look a certain way it would still not be able to do anything about it. Even to act in a certain way, like sitting on a tree that looks like the moth to maximise its camouflage,  seems to point to an instinctive action that has no measure of intelligence and would still only be possible if the moth actually physically looked the way it did due to the evolutionary process explained above.

No choice – No thoughts – No intent – Only instinct and the randomness of nature involved in this result carved by the environment around it.

Then I was sitting in front of the fire a few weeks later. About 8 hours North West of Sydney in the mountains close to Bendemeer hunting with a few mates. It’s late, about three in the morning and I am nursing the last few coals on the fire to their end with a nice glass of scotch.

I notice the different pieces of wood in the fire have substantially different gradients of glow. The red gums burn with a much deeper orange and for much longer than the softer pine that disappears in minutes.
The fire almost a stage that shows the essence of it’s participants by allowing them to burn in their own way, their last breath, a show and tell of what they have been up to all their lives. All that’s left of them at the end was their unique glow and the heat from the flame.

In people, in my opinion, what’s left is the influence they had on others – it’s our glow and the heat we emit on our stage.

What a massive responsibility that little moth had in representing thousands of its kind as the only one left present.

You want to make sure that if you are the one nature picked to live, you have a positive influence on those around you and you do your best to represent what you are.  I don’t think we always appreciate the events in nature that had to take place for each of us to have our turn on this stage and whom we represent with our presence.