Weirdness

This morning I did a couple of loads of laundry. It being a lovely day, I decided to hang the first load on the clothes line instead of using the dryer. Tom was working in the yard and called to see what I was doing. When I explained, he said, "You are such a good spouse. [Pause] Oh, you're doing your own laundry." 

Ha. Ha.

I shouted back, "I took care of your clothes already. I put them in the Goodwill bin." 

Ha. Ha.

Anyway, I had finished hanging things up when I noticed a streak of something white on some pajama bottoms. Thinking that the potential for bird poop was the reason I had hesitated to do this environmentally friendly thing to start with, I went over to check it out. It looked exactly like a streak of said bird do, but when I went to lift the pajamas, the streak lifted wings and flew away. It had been a small white moth.

I told Tom and said I didn't know if it was coincidence or strategy -- probably disguising itself as bird poop would keep birds from eating it.

Then a couple of hours later I happened across a link on Weird Universe for Monday that directed me to this article from the magazine Science:

How to ward off hungry birds if you're a tasty caterpillar? Try to look like something really distasteful: bird poop. Some caterpillars are masters of disguise, fine-tuning their poo mimicry with a grab bag of tricks—using color, pattern, choice of resting place, and, sometimes, contorting their bodies to match the squiggly shape of bird droppings. In a paper published online this month in Animal Behaviour, scientists used artificial edible caterpillars created from pastry dough to see if a bent shape made birds less likely to gobble them up. The replicas resembled moth larvae Apochima juglansiaria, shown above, and Macrauzata maxima, both of which masquerade as bird droppings. They pinned the models on cherry trees, the natural habitat of moth larvae, bending some into squiggles while keeping others straight. Birds attacked the bent ones almost three times less often than the straight ones. When the researchers performed the same experiment with green caterpillars that do not mimic bird droppings, there was no difference in attack rate between the bent and unbent models. This is the first experimental demonstration of how posture can help caterpillars masquerade as inedible objects.

I have to say that my moth looked much less disgusting than that caterpillar. My question is why birds would attack even the straight ones.