As long as undisguised animals are present, wildlife resembling natural objects like stones, sticks or leaves are four times less likely to be attacked by a predator.
Corryn Wetzel is a writer.
Masquerade camouflage is a type of camouflage used by the leaf-mimic katydid.
There is a doctor named Dr Morley Read.
Animals that look like objects are better able to hide than animals that look like something else. When it came to finding animals using masquerade camouflage, predator took four times as long as they did for undisguised animals.
zebras are difficult to hide from a herd because of their stripes, some spiders are overlooked because they look like bird droppings, and colour-changing chameleons are able to disappear into the background. No one had looked at how these approaches stack up against each other.
The State University of Campinas in Brazil has never compared the different types of camouflage. It would be a great opportunity to understand how camouflage evolved.
The data from 84 publications was used to find out which camouflage strategy was the most effective. Most studies involved insects being hunted by birds, fish or humans in a computer game style simulation.
Having any form of camouflage increased predator search time by an average of 63 percent and decreased the likelihood of an attack by 27 percent. The animals that used masquerade camouflage were the most successful in delaying an attack.
Blending into a backdrop or having chaotic colour patterns increase predator search time by 55 per cent
Anna Hughes is a researcher at the University of Essex in the UK. The paper is useful for seeing where gaps in knowledge exist.
Most of the studies that the researchers were able to review were from North America and Europe. They want to examine the phenomena on a global scale as the body of research grows.
The journal was published by the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
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