A TIME OF TRICKERY

Rex Burress

Life involves competition among various species of living things in the quest for survival, and trickery is high on the list for use in gaining an advantage.

Trickery involves human issues too. Deceit is quite apparent when you know the full extent of TV commercials, sale ads, political methods, and even food advertising. Things like meats, fruits, and vegetables are often rampant with misleading statements, and various cereals endlessly advertise the healthy virtues of their sugary chips. This week the government condemned sugar and salt as food villians.

Some of the sneakiest forms of commercial illusion is found in those attractive posts on internet offerings. The start of a stirring statement, the provocative picture of a glamorous woman, or an incredibly inexpensive sale item, leads you to click the site, only to be led down a slippery slope of sidebar advertisements. When one of those slip-in ads occur, to proceed, you have to find the hidden “X” and click off the impediment to reach the original allurement that may not be so alluring after-all. TV commercials...thank goodness for the mute button. We still have some choices! Blessed are they who avoid the pitfalls of life, even though the pits are tricky!

There is trickery in the fisherman using artificial lures to fool the fish, too, and the hunter using decoys to attract waterfowl. “Hidden trick in baseball; crossover dribble in basketball; quarterback sneak in football”--there are endless tricks of the trade.

Deception is too often a human trait, whether in money schemes, misrepresentations, or stolen identities as in card thefts. If true, the Bill Cosby trickery to obtain sex with women by drugging them is an especially revolting bit of trickery.

Trickery in nature usually involves deception. It seems nearly every living thing is either trying to attract something, or to hide from something, whether attracting by showy appearance, or hiding by camouflage concealment.

In the cryptic coloration type of camouflage, the deceit is used by many animals and plants to avoid being detected, as in hiding from predators, or as used by predators to slip up on their prey. The tawny color of the lion blends right in with the dry African savannah, just as the tiger's stripes become shadows in the jungle, allowing the cats to do some effective disappearing acts. Living things resort to trickery because it works in increasing their chances of survival.

The killdeer found in fields along the Feather River, uses delusion to hide their splotched eggs among the pebbles, plus the bird blends with the nest site. If discovered, the parent lures the intruder away be pretending to have a broken wing.

Examples of nature's disguises abound. Insects and other invertebrates have some incredible ways to use camouflage and mimicry. Even reptiles get in on the confusion game; the alligator snapping turtle dangles a worm-like appendage on its tongue to entice small fish into its parlor, as does the angler fish in the ocean. The colored bands on the harmless scarlet king snake resembles the venomous coral snake, thereby gaining an advantage from the coral snake's deadly reputation.

In the same sense, the harmless hog-nosed snake of America uses the cobra's fearsome reputation to scare enemies away. Like the venomous cobras in Asia, the hog-nose flattens the neck, hisses, and rears upward, mimicking the cobra even though the species are an ocean apart. Who learned the defensive maneuver first, and how?

Spiders not only use ingenious methods in trapping the fly, there's some cute trickery about hiding their webs through iridescence. Some species of crab spiders that stalk their insect prey by hiding on flowers, can actually change their color to match the petals.

Moths feature wing spots that resemble owl's eyes, various orchids resemble insects to gain their attention to help spread the pollen, skunk cabbage smells like skunk, and on and on to a myriad of tricks used by living organisms to maintain an existence on earth.

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.” --Groucho Marx

“One thing you can't fake is chemistry.” --Blake Shelton