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Butterfly wing patterns make motion hard to read
Gopal Murali is at the Center for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru 560012, India.
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“The importance of stillness as an aid to concealment can hardly be overestimated,” wrote zoologist Hugh Cott1. Yet prey cannot always remain still. Movement is among the most powerful cues that animals use to detect and track objects, creating a fundamental problem: even the best camouflage can fail once an animal moves2. Certain high-contrast patterns in prey, such as a zebra’s stripes, have long been proposed1,3 as an alternative defensive strategy during motion, but gaining supporting evidence has proved surprisingly difficult4. Writing in Nature, Hancock et al.5 put this century-old idea to a new test in butterflies.
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Cott, H. B. Adaptive Coloration in Animals (Methuen, 1940).
Ioannou, C. C. & Krause, J. Biol. Lett. 5, 191–193 (2009).
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Thayer, G. H. Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (Macmillan, 1909).