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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.
The distinction between aggressive mimicry and predator camouflage depends on the signal given to the prey, not easily determined. Aggressive mimicry is a form of mimicry in which predators, parasites, or parasitoids share similar signals, using a harmless model, allowing them to avoid being correctly identified by their prey or host.
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 ...
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.
Birds hunt by sight, so the mimicry in that case is visual, but in other cases mimicry may make use of any of the senses. Most types of mimicry, including Batesian, are deceptive, as the mimics are not harmful, but Müllerian mimicry , where different harmful species resemble each other, is honest , as when species of wasps and of bees all have ...
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.
Soldiers often wrongly viewed camouflage netting as a kind of invisibility cloak, and they had to be taught to look at camouflage practically, from an enemy observer's viewpoint. [ 66 ] [ 67 ] At the same time in Australia , zoologist William John Dakin advised soldiers to copy animals' methods, using their instincts for wartime camouflage.
Animal coloration, readily observable, soon provided strong and independent lines of evidence, from camouflage, mimicry and aposematism, that natural selection was indeed at work. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] [ 8 ] The historian of science Peter J. Bowler wrote that Darwin's theory "was also extended to the broader topics of protective resemblances and mimicry ...