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In ecology, crypsis is the ability of an animal or a plant [1] to avoid observation or detection by other animals. It may be part of a predation strategy or an antipredator adaptation . Methods include camouflage , nocturnality , subterranean lifestyle and mimicry .
Many predators forage most intensively at night, whereas others are active at midday and see best in full sun. The crepuscular habit may both reduce predation pressure, increasing the crepuscular populations, and offer better foraging opportunities to predators that increasingly focus their attention on crepuscular prey until a new balance is ...
Anti-predator adaptation in action: the kitefin shark (a–c) and the Atlantic wreckfish (d–f) attempt to prey on hagfishes. First, the predators approach their potential prey. Predators bite or try to swallow the hagfishes, but the hagfishes have already projected jets of slime (arrows) into the predators' mouths.
Predator–prey coevolution often makes it unfavorable for a predator to consume certain prey items, since many anti-predator defenses increase handling time. [16] Examples include porcupine quills, the palatability and digestibility of the poison dart frog, crypsis, and other predator avoidance behaviors. In addition, because toxins may be ...
In ecology, crypsis is the ability of an animal or a plant to avoid observation or detection by other animals. It may be a predation strategy or an anti-predator adaptation. Methods include camouflage, nocturnality, subterranean lifestyle and mimicry. Crypsis can involve visual, olfactory (with pheromones), or auditory
It is often combined with other methods of crypsis including background colour matching and countershading; special cases are coincident disruptive coloration and the disruptive eye mask seen in some fishes, amphibians, and reptiles. It appears paradoxical as a way of not being seen, since disruption of outlines depends on high contrast, so the ...
Aggressive mimicry often involves the predator employing signals which draw its potential prey towards it, a strategy which allows predators to simply sit and wait for prey to come to them. The promise of food or sex are most commonly used as lures. However, this need not be the case; as long as the predator's true identity is concealed, it may ...
A wide range of animals, e.g. lizards, birds, rodents, and sharks, behave as if dead as an anti-predator adaptation, as predators usually take only live prey. [ 14 ] In beetles, artificial selection experiments have shown that there is heritable variation for length of death-feigning.