The Three-Minute Outdoorsman: Wild Science from Magnetic Deer to Mumbling Carp

62. Camouflage

t h e t h r e e - m i n u t e o u t d o o r s m a n 234 to whether she hung out in his harem. So she might in fact have been hanging out in a harem ruled by her uncle. But she did not ultimately mate with closely related males. Maybe she somehow figured out during her visit to a harem that the male was a close relative and hence didn’t choose him as the sire of her kids. Given their observations, the researchers concluded that does practiced inbreeding avoidance during the actual mating period, which for them is twenty-four to forty-eight hours, but not in the weeks leading up to the “event.” Like any situation in nature, there were some mistakes. As I noted earlier, the same authors found in an earlier study that about 18 percent of the fawns were “moderately inbred” and showed the effects mentioned above. However, this might be a function of low population size and a shortage of available males. Thus, although inbreeding avoidance is a good thing, antelope have not perfected it. Apparently , they avoid it if possible. Too bad the Habsburgs didn’t figure that out in time. 62 camouflage one of life’s universals Blending into your environment can take many forms. One dictionary defines camouflage as “the devices that animals use to blend into their environment in order to avoid being seen by predators or prey.” Most hunters have a variety of camo clothing designed to blend into different habitats to conceal themselves from different game species. Camouflage is not always the squiggly patterns of grays and browns that we are used to. When hunting deer or turkeys from my ground blind, I wear a black shirt and mask to blend into the black background of the blind. Examples of camouflage are widespread in nature. The col- A N I M A L I N T E L L I G E N C E 235 oration of hen pheasants and other ground-nesting birds allows them to blend into the nesting area. Many insects look like leaves or twigs. We could spend hours tallying up the ways that animals conceal themselves. But the point of this essay is to explore the question, when did animals start using camouflage? A 2012 article on the evolution of camouflage in insects by Ricardo Pérez de la Fuente and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests it’s been millions of years! Insects and many other creatures are not only camouflaged by their coloration but by things they gather from the environment . Pérez de la Fuente and colleagues wrote about the green lacewing, one of about twelve hundred species of lacewings. Adults fly around, looking not unlike mayflies. But immature lacewings wander about on plants, eating other insects. To conceal themselves, larvae have special structures sticking out from their bodies that help them accumulate stuff, or trash, from the environment. The trash can be bits of plant material or shed exoskeletons from other insects. By adorning itself with debris, the lacewing blends in with the environment—it has a sort of mobile blind. Pérez de la Fuente discovered an amazing immature lacewing in amber from Spain that lived in the Early Cretaceous, about 110 million years ago! On the top of the larva were special processes that formed a sort of basket, which they referred to as a “dense trash packet.” They discovered that the basket contained parts of an ancient fern, known to be an early colonizer of fire-prone environments (the fires likely led to the amber resins that trapped our now-famous trash-hording immature lacewing). The authors speculated that the trash basket had at least three functions: camouflage , a defensive shield, and chemical defense. Certainly the trash provided mobile camouflage. Predatory insects, like “true bugs,” have long mouthparts that they can stick into a lacewing’s soft body; the authors suggested that the trash packet shielded the larva from such an attack. Lastly, a compound (phenols) in the ferns was speculated to act as a chemical deterrent—a sort of t h e t h r e e - m i n u t e o u t d o o r s m a n 236 predator-away scent! So over 100 million years ago, this bug...