Comparison of the effectiveness of camouflage in different animals

A quartet of researchers from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Básicas, Universidade de São Paulo and São Bernardo do Campo, all in Brazil, conducted a study on the effectiveness of different types of camouflage strategies in animals. In her article published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological SciencesJoão Vitor de Alcantara Viana, Camila Vieira, Rafael Campos Duarte and Gustavo Quevedo Romero describe their study and what strategy they considered the most effective.

Much work has been done to study the camouflage strategies of various animals, from color-changing chameleons to caterpillars that look like leaves or twigs. But as the researchers found in this new effort, very little, if any, work has been done to compare the different strategies between different creatures. Surprised by this result, they conducted their own study.

The researchers’ study involved searching for published work on camouflage in all creatures for the period 1900 to 2022 and then comparing the results. As their work progressed, they narrowed their focus to just 84 studies – each had involved conducting experiments to assess how well a particular camouflage strategy worked and also how long it took a predator to find camouflaged prey. Some of the studies also included data on how often certain camouflaged animals were attacked.

The researchers then split the studies into categories — creatures that used “background matching” as a strategy and creatures that used masking as a strategy. The latter meant those species that look like a non-prey type object, such as a leaf.

Looking at their data, the researchers found that the animals that masked themselves (compared to background matching) were less likely to be seen by a predator, let alone hunted or eaten. This was most evident in those who were very good mimics, such as caterpillars who closely resembled the trees they lived on. The researchers also found that camouflage was generally an effective survival strategy – search times for them were 62% longer than for similar non-cloaked creatures.

Researchers hypothesize that the reason more creatures aren’t using masking as a camouflage strategy is that the creature generally needs to be roughly the same size as the object it’s trying to match. They also noted that most studies on camouflage have been conducted in the northern hemisphere. They suggest that much more work needs to be done to learn about the true effectiveness of the different types of camouflage used by animals around the world. They also note that similar work is underexplored regarding predators that use camouflage to capture prey.

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