Generalist camouflage can be more successful than microhabitat specialisation in natural environments.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Crypsis by background-matching is a critical form of anti-predator defence for animals exposed to visual predators, but achieving effective camouflage in patchy and variable natural environments is not straightforward. To cope with heterogeneous backgrounds, animals could either specialise on particular microhabitat patches, appearing cryptic in some areas but mismatching others, or adopt a compromise strategy, providing partial matching across different patch types. Existing studies have tested the effectiveness of compromise strategies in only a limited set of circumstances, primarily with small targets varying in pattern, and usually in screen-based tasks. Here, we measured the detection risk associated with different background-matching strategies for relatively larg

SUBMITTER: Briolat ES 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8330473 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature