But it does not always survive encounters with reality, as the French example shows.
Obviously a lot of people don't survive encounters like that, and if they do, they have horrific injuries.
And even those who survive encounters with nature's bitterest weather often speak of having been marked forever by the experience.
Most hopes turn out to be false hopes based upon wishful thinking and false expectations that cannot survive encounters with harsh reality.
Almost overnight, the small Missouri town became a symbol of everything from the militarization of local police to the countless incidents in which unarmed people of color don't survive encounters with cops.
Other naïve prey, however, respond appropriately enough to survive encounters with predators that they have never seen before – neither within their lifetime nor in their known evolutionary past.
In his book, Darwin expected that the ability of terrestrial organisms to survive encounters with water might decrease the risk of dispersal and promote terrestrial organisms to cross aquatic areas [ 11].
Our data indicate that, in contrast to the previously accepted view, long-distance dispersal of the spiders in our study is not limited by selection to avoid encounters with water because individuals display behavioural adaptations that allow them to survive encounters with aquatic environments.
The ability of individuals capable of long-distance aerial dispersal to survive encounters with water allows them to disperse repeatedly, thereby increasing the pace and spatial scale over which they can spread and subsequently exert an influence on the ecosystems into which they migrate.
In our study we find that ballooning in a subset of individuals from two groups of widely-distributed and phylogenetically distinct terrestrial spiders (linyphiids and one tetragnathid) is associated with a hitherto undescribed ability of those same individuals to survive encounters with both fresh and marine water.
The greater survival of nematodes that first fed on benign E. coli and then survived encounters with pathogenic Burkholderia could also result from upregulation of innate immunity by their initial prey.
