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According to Charles Darwin's 1859 theory of natural selection, features such as coloration evolved by providing individual animals with a reproductive advantage. For example, individuals with slightly better camouflage than others of the same species would, on average, leave more offspring.
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 ...
Camouflage is the use of any combination of materials, coloration, or illumination for concealment, either by making animals or objects hard to see, or by disguising them as something else. Examples include the leopard 's spotted coat, the battledress of a modern soldier , and the leaf-mimic katydid 's wings.
Camouflage is an exciting animal adaptation that allows many different types of animals to blend in with their surroundings. The chameleon is one of the most recognizable animals that camouflages ...
Active camouflage is used in several groups of animals, including reptiles on land, and cephalopod molluscs and flatfish in the sea. Animals achieve active camouflage both by color change and (among marine animals such as squid) by counter-illumination , with the use of bioluminescence .
Disruptive coloration (also known as disruptive camouflage or disruptive patterning) is a form of camouflage that works by breaking up the outlines of an animal, soldier or military hardware with a strongly contrasting pattern.
Countershading, or Thayer's law, is a method of camouflage in which an animal's coloration is darker on the top or upper side and lighter on the underside of the body. [1] This pattern is found in many species of mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, and insects, both in predators and in prey.
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.