Camouflage In Nature: Form,Color,Pattern Matching (1979)

Colors and patterns in nature. Plant life with a variety of colors and many different patterns. Part of the environment for the birds and other animals you'll find living here. A nighthawk with a varied pattern of light and dark colors blending with the plant life around its nest. Another environment where there's much less rainfall and where you'll find animals like these prairie dogs whose color and pattern blend with their surroundings. Color and pattern matching and sometimes the shape or form of the body can make it easier for animals to hide from their enemies. We call it protective resemblance, a kind of natural camouflage. [Music] This camouflage or protective resemblance is one way that animals are adapted to their environments. It's interesting to compare animals of the same type living in different environments. a western chipmunk. It matches the rather drab colors of its surroundings. And an eastern chipmunk. It has brighter colors and sharper contrasts that match the pattern of light and shadow of these surroundings. The cottontail rabbit you see in the eastern woodlands has a much darker color than the jack rabbit you find on the dry western plains. or compare the sandy color of the Sidewinder, a desert rattlesnake, with the bold markings of the eastern rattlesnake. But color and pattern matching is not the whole story. You've probably seen a Katy did. It's a relative of the grasshopper. You could easily mistake it for a leaf, not only because of its color, but also because of its shape or form. So form, the shape of an animal is another kind of protective resemblance. Then there's the preying mantis. It looks something like a leafy twig. The mantis feeds on other insects. Its shape and color help it to hide from those insects as it waits to catch and eat them, as well as to avoid being eaten itself. There's another insect among these twigs right here. It's called a walking stick, and that's just what it looks like. Because of the shape of the walking stick, a bird might easily mistake it for a twig. Most often, protective resemblance means that an animal matches its surroundings, but not always. This viceroy butterfly doesn't match its surroundings. But compare the viceroy with a monarch butterfly. Monarch and viceroy, not quite the same, but very close. Now, the monarch is usually avoided by birds, probably because of its taste. And that means that birds are also likely to avoid the viceroy. This kind of protective resemblance is called mimickry, and you'll find it in other types of animal life, too. This is a coral snake, one of the most deadly of all poisonous snakes. The bright bands of color make it easy to recognize and avoid. Now, compare the color and pattern of the deadly coral snake with the color and pattern of the scarlet king snake. very similar, but this snake is not poisonous. And yet, since it mimics the appearance of a poisonous snake, this scarlet king will probably be avoided by predators, too. There are other ways that certain patterns can give some protection. The goldfinch has bold, contrasting colors that break up the outline of its body and make it harder to see. The markings of the abviset might suggest shadows and reflections that can disguise the shape of its [Music] body. Bob White quail. The bold markings around their eyes seem to break up the outline of their heads, and that may confuse a predator. A pattern of stripes may protect a ground squirrel in a special way. Stripes that run lengthwise along an animal's body might help to conceal its forward motion. You can get an idea of how that works by watching this garder [Music] snake. A seagull has a fairly simple color pattern. It's called countershading and it's found in several types of animals. Seen from above, the gull's gray wings might resemble the color of the dark water. And from below, the white underside might be harder to see against the bright sky. Most seagulls of the same type have the same color and pattern. But that's not true of all birds. These are both boba links, a male and a female, and yet they have different colors and different patterns. In the nesting season, the female spends most of her time at the nest, and her color and pattern blend with the surroundings. That helps protect the young birds as well as the mother. But the father is more noticeable because he doesn't match his surroundings. That might help to draw attention away from the nest. A ringnecked pheasant, a male, also brightly colored and very different from the female who has the nesting chores. This difference in color between male and female is found in several types of birds, including these fallopes. This time you have to look closely to see the difference. One of them has a more striking color pattern around the head and neck, but this is the female. The male fallop doesn't have the bold markings and he tends the nest. Then there are birds like these egrets. All of the adults are white, but a young egret has dark feathers. The darker color probably helps protect the bird while it's young and less able to escape from an enemy. [Music] Here's another young animal that's different from its parents in color and pattern. The light colored specks you see on the body of a fawn suggest a pattern of sunlight and shadow that might confuse an enemy. As it grows older and better able to escape a predator, the fawn's color pattern will gradually change. [Music] You can see another kind of color change in animals like the tarmaggan. Right now, the tarmaggan's feathers all blend with the ground and the grass. A few weeks later, some of the brown feathers have been replaced by white. [Music] The tarmaggan's color change matches the changing seasons. Here's a snowshoe rabbit, also matching the white of the snow around [Music] it. But before long, the environment begins to change again. [Music] By summer, the color of our snowshoe rabbit has changed from white to brown. This tree frog can also change color to match its surroundings, but not just twice a year. It's one of several animals that can change skin color very [Music] quickly. Here's another one, a fish called the flounder. Usually its color and pattern blend with the ocean floor where it [Music] lives. When it settles down to rest, it's almost invisible against the [Music] sand. Now to see how well it can change color and pattern, we can put our flounder on an artificial background. It comes remarkably close to matching even this color and pattern. Of course, you won't find many animals that can change their color the way a flounder does. And many animals don't match their surroundings at all. A porcupine is one. Its sharp quills are a good defense against a predator. And animals with good defenses don't need protective resemblance. [Music] Some other animals like the bear have very few natural enemies, so they don't need protective resemblance either. But many animals do depend on form, color, and pattern matching to help them survive. This protective resemblance is a natural type of camouflage, one of the ways that animals are adapted for life in their environments. [Music]