If I could be any animal in the world I’d probably plump for a golden eagle or something along those lines. In reality, knowing my luck I’d come back as something that sucked up decaying whales at the deepest, blackest point in the ocean. But whatever I came back as I’d hope that I was good at hiding myself, nature is a violent place to be. Being able to blend into your surroundings and become functionally invisible must be a bit of a buzz.
Obviously an animal that tastes good is going to need some sort of defence. Some critters go for poison, or spikes, or living in deep holes. Others go for camouflage. Over millions of years these delicious morsels have been selectively bred to become one with their surroundings.
Have a look through these masters of disguise and be rightfully amazed…
This caterpillar is a wizard of disguise. Euthalia aconthea lives in India and Southeast Asia. When they grow up they look like this…
These Australian owl-like birds are nocturnal and popular with farmers thanks to their diet which consists almost exclusively of “pest” species. The disguise doesn’t work quite so well when there’s a group of them, but it’s still pretty cool looking:
Katydid, also known as bush crickets, long-horned grasshoppers or Tettigoniidae consist of around 6,400 separate species, many of which are awesome at hiding from predators. As far as succesful species go, these guys have done pretty well. They’re found on all of the continents except Antarctica, although they’re more common in tropical regions.
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These guys are a terrifying mix of impossible to spot and lethally poisonous. They’re the most venomous fish in the sea and a tickle from one of their spines can kill a human in two hours. These hidden neurotoxin carrying stone fish are members of the Synaceia family and are widely distributed throughout warmer oceans.
It’s recommended that you swim rather than walk over rocks in areas where stone fish chill out. The harder you step on them the more toxin they release into you, so if you are walking, walk lightly.
What a little ripper. There are at least 7 different species of pygmy seahorse, all of which live in and around coral and have become pretty darned impressive at hiding among it. They’re found in Asia all the way down to Australasia, although you probably wouldn’t actually find them, they’re ace at hiding and most don’t ever reach more than 2 cm in length.
To be quite honest if I hadn’t been told there was a gecko in the picture above I wouldn’t have noticed it. It’s a pretty thorough disguise. The mossy leaf-tailed gecko Uroplatus sikorae is a Madagascan species of gecko that not only shapes itself to its surroundings but can also change its skin tone to match. Thanks to deforestation the mossy leaf-tailed gecko is now classed as endangered.
Here’s a picture of it out of hiding so you can see what it actually looks like…
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No list of animals that are ace at camouflage would be complete without the most famous of nature’s hide-and-seekers: the chameleon. Chameleons change their colour as a method of communicating mood to their mates and also as a nifty way of not getting eaten.
Recent research shows that these chameleons are even more skilled at hiding than was first thought. They fine tune their colour according to their predator’s visual system. Researchers found that chameleons matched colour with their surroundings more accurately when presented with a model bird than a model snake because a bird’s colour perception is better than a reptiles. Now that’s magic.
Cuttlefish are really weird. They are the true masters of colour changing ability. Each square millimetre of their skin holds up to 200 colour changing chromatophores. Their ability to change colour is lightning fast and dashingly accurate. They have W-shaped pupils, eight arms, two tentacles with toothy suckers on them and one of the largest brain to body ratios in the invertebrate world.
Watch this video below of an Octopus, another member of the Cephalopoda family. This is literally mind-blowing. Watch the bit when they reverse the footage in slow mo. Honestly, this is the best video I’ve seen for weeks. Nature is WILD:
Here’s a video of chromatophores in action:
It seems that cuttlefish rely on contrast rather than colour when disguising themselves against their background. So if you put them on something blue, as below, they don’t even try to adapt. Cheques? No problem.This is a pretty impressive attempt isn’t it?:
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Most scorpionfish don’t do camouflage, but Merlet’s certainly does, and it does it with a pretty jaunty dose of panache. These guys, as their name suggests, are pretty poisonous. They have spines covered in a toxic mucus.
Another gecko, and what a blinder. Even its Latin name is amazing – Uroplatus phantasticus. These 6 inch long masters of beguiling disguise are only found in Madagascar.
