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Diffused lighting camouflage was a form of active camouflage using counter-illumination to enable a ship to match its background, the night sky, that was tested by the Royal Canadian Navy on corvettes during World War II. The principle was discovered by a Canadian professor, Edmund Godfrey Burr, in 1940.
Diffused lighting camouflage, in which visible light is projected on to the sides of ships to match the faint glow of the night sky, was trialled by Canada's National Research Council from 1941 onwards, and then by the Royal Navy, during the Second World War. Some 60 light projectors were mounted all around the hull and on the ships ...
The first of these was the so-called diffused lighting camouflage tested on Canadian Navy corvettes including HMCS Rimouski. This was followed in the United States Army Air Forces with the airborne Yehudi lights project, and trials in ships of the Royal Navy and the US Navy . [ 11 ]
Counterillumination camouflage is the likely function of the bioluminescence of many marine organisms, though light is also produced to attract [125] or to detect prey [126] and for signalling. Counterillumination has rarely been used for military purposes.
There is a strong evolutionary pressure for prey animals to avoid predators through camouflage, and for predators to be able to detect camouflaged prey. There can be a self-perpetuating coevolution, in the shape of an evolutionary arms race, between the perceptive abilities of animals attempting to detect the cryptic animal and the cryptic characteristics of the hiding species.
By directing the light forwards towards an observer (rather than towards the aircraft's skin), the system provided effective and efficient counter-illumination camouflage, more like that of marine animals such as the firefly squid than the Canadian diffused lighting approach. The system never entered active service.
Thayer's 1902 patent application. He failed to convince the US Navy. The English zoologist Edward Bagnall Poulton, author of The Colours of Animals (1890) discovered the countershading of various insects, including the pupa or chrysalis of the purple emperor butterfly, Apatura iris, [2] the caterpillar larvae of the brimstone moth, Opisthograptis luteolata [a] and of the peppered moth, Biston ...
Disruptive patterns are defined by A. Barbosa and colleagues as "characterized by high-contrast light and dark patches, in a nonrepetitive configuration, that also provide camouflage by disrupting the recognizable shape or orientation of the animal", as in the cuttlefish. [5]