At Hogwarts, Harry Potter uses an invisibility cloak to hide from his enemies. In nature, animals like cuttlefish and chameleons use the awe-inspiring tricks of camouflage to hide from theirs.
Roger Hanlon, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), has spent 35 years studying animal camouflage, and in that time he has moved beyond awe at nature's disappearing tricks and discovered three broad classes of camouflage body patterns. He and his colleagues detail these three pattern classes, and how they achieve several mechanisms of visual deceit, in this week's issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. The issue is entirely devoted to camouflage.
"Camouflage is found throughout the animal kingdom, among big, small, wet, and dry animals, but it is probably one of the least-studied natural phenomena we know of," Hanlon says.
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This is so cool! I want to see a Discovery Channel or Animal Planet special on these camouflage discoveries PRONTO. Or I guess reading the report would suffice.
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