Animals use colours, patterns, or even shape to blend in with their surroundings. This is called camouflage, and some animals are masters of deception. Danger is part of life in animal kingdom, but camouflage is a great survival technique to avoid hungry predators or to sneak up on prey.

Hide and seek

There are many ways in which animals hide from each other. Some copy an object, such as a flower, or change colours completely, while other animals group together to have safety in numbers.

Leaf-tailed gecko

Lookalike

The leaf-tailed gecko is a carnivorous animal and the bulk of this lizard’s diet is primarily comprised of insects. Leaf-tailed geckos also hunt a number of other invertebrates along with the odd small rodents or reptile should it get the chance. Leaf-tailed geckos are nocturnal hunters, most actively searching the forest for food under the cover of night.

The excellent camouflage of the leaf-tailed gecko can make this animal pretty tricky for predators to spot. Birds of prey such as owls and eagles, along with rats and snakes are the most common predators of the leaf-tailed gecko in its native environment. It’s a leaf – tailed gecko from Madagascar! Some animals mimic an object in their surroundings, such as a dead leaf, so a predator won’t recognize them.

Herd of zebras

Double vision

The first is as simple pattern-camouflage, much like the type the military uses in its fatigue design. The wavy lines of a zebra blend in with the wavy lines of the tall grass around it. It doesn’t matter that the zebra’s stripes are black and white and the lines of the grass are yellow, brown or green, because the zebra’s main predator, the lion, is colorblind. The pattern of the camouflage is much more important than its color, when hiding from these predators. If a zebra is standing still in matching surroundings, a lion may overlook it completely. Stripes offer camouflage in the grasslands as patterns blend in with foliage. Faced with a herd of zebras, a predator will struggle to choose a single target in the sea of stripes.

Crab spiders

Colour change

Crab spider is a type of spider that belongs to the family Thomisidae. There are more than 2.000 species of crab spiders that can be found around the world. Crab spiders inhabit gardens, meadows, woodlands, tropical rainforests, grasslands, marshes and scrublands. They can be found in all kind of habitats except in the extremely dry deserts and very cold mountains. All species of crab spiders are numerous in the wild. Some crab spiders can change colour from white to yellow to match the flowers they live on. Then they can creep up on their insect prey, such as this hoverfly.

Disguised moth

Moths and their caterpillars have many predators and so have evolved a variety of tricks to avoid being eaten. Many use camouflage, with subtle colours and patterns which blend in with their surroundings. The results are not just astonishingly clever, but often very beautiful. Moths are particularly at risk of being spotted in daylight, so many have colours and patterns to match the places they rest in. This is why so many moths are patterned in greys and browns, which are hard to see in shadows and blend with the bark of branches. It is easy to miss a peppered moth, but look again. When this moth rests flat against a tree, its patterned wings merge perfectly with the bark.

 

Picture Credit : Google