Many animals use the spectral distribution of light to guide behaviour, but whether they have
colour vision has been debated for over a century. Our strong subjective experience of …

The development and maintenance of color polymorphism in cryptic prey species is a
source of enduring fascination, in part because it appears to result from selective processes …

Animal camouflage represents one of the most important ways of preventing (or facilitating)
predation. It attracted the attention of the earliest evolutionary biologists, and today remains …

Being able to quantify the conspicuousness of animal and plant colouration is key to
understanding its evolutionary and adaptive significance. Camouflaged animals, for …

Aposematic color patterns that signal prey unprofitability are suggested to work best when
there is high contrast within the animal color pattern or between the animal and its …

Aposematism and crypsis are often viewed as two extremes of a continuum of visual
conspicuousness to predators. Theory predicts that behavioral and coloration …

Initially, aposematism, which is an unprofitable trait, eg noxiousness conspicuously
advertised to predators, appears to be a paradox since conspicuousness should increase …

Aposematic prey advertise their defences, such as toxins or stings, to visually hunting
predators using conspicuous warning coloration. Both the conspicuousness and the …

Rapid colour change is a remarkable natural phenomenon that has evolved in several
vertebrate and invertebrate lineages. The two principal explanations for the evolution of this …

Sexual selection often favors brighter and exaggerated traits, which also increase the risk of
detection by predators. Signals that are preferentially conspicuous to conspecifics would …