Background selection for camouflage shifts in accordance with color change in an intertidal prawn.

ABSTRACT: To maximize camouflage across visually heterogeneous habitats, animals have evolved a variety of strategies, including polyphenism, color change, and behavioral background matching. Despite the expected importance of behavioral processes for mediating camouflage, such as selection for matching substrates, behavior has received less attention than color traits themselves, and interactions between color change and behavior are largely unexplored. Here, we investigated behavioral background matching in green and red chameleon prawns (Hippolyte varians) over the course of a color change experiment. Prawns were housed on mismatching green and red seaweeds for 30 days and periodically given a choice test between the same seaweeds in y-choice trials over the experiment. We found that, as p

SUBMITTER: Green SD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11453103 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep-Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature