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Methods include camouflage, nocturnality, subterranean lifestyle and mimicry. Crypsis can involve visual, olfactory (with pheromones) or auditory concealment. When it is visual, the term cryptic coloration, effectively a synonym for animal camouflage, is sometimes used, but many different methods of camouflage are employed in nature.
Chapter 11 argues (in a way that was heavily criticised when the book appeared, see below) that water birds, some of them highly conspicuous like the jacana and notoriously the male wood duck, are colored for camouflage: "The beautifully contrasted black-and-white bars on the flanks of the Wood Duck (Aix sponsa) are ripple pictures, and as ...
Camouflage enables an animal to remain hidden from view. Animals use colour to advertise services such as cleaning to animals of other species; to signal their sexual status to other members of the same species; and in mimicry, taking advantage of the warning coloration of another species.
The camouflage of predators including lizards, angler fish, mantises including Hymenopus bicornis and the bird-dropping spider is described. "Adventitious protection", making use of materials from the environment, is illustrated with examples such as the decorator crabs and caddis fly larvae, which build tubes "of grains of sand, small shells ...
At the first level, as with protective mimicry like false eyespots and camouflage, the action or display is inbuilt. At the second level, an animal performs a programmed act of behaviour, as when a prey animal feigns death to avoid being eaten.
According to Mitchell, adult giraffes are "inescapably conspicuous", making the conclusion that their patterns are for camouflage appear counterintuitive: but when standing among trees and bushes, their camouflage is effective at even a few metres' distance. [12] Irregular outline of comma butterfly Polygonia c-album avoids a typical butterfly ...
Eyespots could be explained in at least three different ways. They may be a form of mimicry in which a spot on the body of an animal resembles an eye of a different animal, to deceive potential predator or prey species. They may be a form of self-mimicry, to draw a predator's attention away from the prey's most vulnerable body parts. Or they ...
Mimicry is an evolved resemblance between an organism and another object, often an organism of another species. Mimicry may evolve between different species, or between individuals of the same species. Often, mimicry functions to protect from predators. [11] Mimicry systems have three basic roles: a mimic, a model, and a dupe.