Establishing the behavioural limits for countershaded camouflage
Abstract
Countershading is a ubiquitous patterning of animals whereby the side that typically faces the highest illumination is darker. When tuned to specific lighting conditions and body orientation with respect to the light field, countershading minimizes the gradient of light the body reflects by counterbalancing shadowing due to illumination, and has therefore classically been thought of as an adaptation for visual camouflage. However, whether and how crypsis degrades when body orientation with respect to the light field is non-optimal has never been studied. We tested the behavioural limits on body orientation for countershading to deliver effective visual camouflage. We asked human participants to detect a countershaded target in a simulated three-dimensional environment. The target was optimally coloured for crypsis in a reference orientation and was displayed at different orientations. Search performance dramatically improved for deviations beyond 15 degrees. Detection time was significantly shorter and accuracy significantly higher than when the target orientation matched the countershading pattern. This work demonstrates the importance of maintaining body orientation appropriate for the displayed camouflage pattern, suggesting a possible selective pressure for animals to orient themselves appropriately to enhance crypsis.
Citation
Penacchio , O , Harris , J & Lovell , P G 2017 , ' Establishing the behavioural limits for countershaded camouflage ' , Scientific Reports , vol. 7 , 13672 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-13914-y
Publication
Scientific Reports
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2045-2322Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright 2017 the authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Description
This research was supported by the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council UK, grants 610 BB/J000272/1 to JMH and PGL, and by ISSF funding from The Wellcome Trust to OP.Collections
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