Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Camouflage has been a subject of interest as well as study in zoology for more than a century. Baseding on Charles Darwin's 1859 concept of all-natural selection, functions such as camouflage developed by offering individual animals with a reproductive benefit, enabling them to leave even more spawn, generally, than other members of the same species. In his Origin of Species, Darwin composed:

Kings of Camouflage

When we see leaf-eating insect, and bark-feeders mottled-grey; the towering ptarmigan white in wintertime, the red-grouse the colour of heather, and the black-grouse that of peaty planet, we must think that these colors are of solution to these birds as well as insects in preserving them from risk. Complaint, otherwise ruined at some period of their lives, would certainly increase in many numbers; they are known to suffer mainly from birds of victim; and hawks are led by sight to their victim, a lot so, that on parts of the Continent persons are advised not to keep white pigeons, as being the most liable to destruction. For this reason I can see no factor to doubt that natural option could be most reliable in offering the proper colour to each sort of grouse, and in keeping that colour, when once acquired, real and consistent.
The English zoologist Edward Bagnall Poulton studied pet pigmentation, particularly camouflage. His experiments revealed that swallowtailed insect pupae were concealed to match the backgrounds on which they were reared as larvae. Poulton's "basic protective similarity" was at that time thought about to be the main technique of camouflage, as when Frank Evers Beddard composed in 1892 that "tree-frequenting animals are usually green in colour.

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