Camouflage is a key defence across taxa and frequently critical to survival. A common
strategy is background matching, resembling the colour and pattern of the environment. This …

Many animals have a gradation of body color, termed “countershading,” where the areas
that are typically exposed to more light are darker. One hypothesis is that this patterning …

Camouflage may be achieved in three ways: crypsis, disruptive coloration and masquerade
(Endler 1981). Cryptic prey resemble random samples of the visual background (Endler …

Countershading, a vertical luminance gradient from a dark back to a light belly, is perhaps
the most common coloration phenotype in the animal kingdom. Why? We investigated …

One of the most effective defenses against avian brood parasitism is the rejection of the
foreign egg from the host's nest. Until recently, most studies have tested whether hosts …

Avian brood parasites lay their eggs in other birds' nests, and hosts can mitigate the fitness
cost of raising unrelated offspring by rejecting parasitic eggs. A visually-based cognitive …

Cryptic animal coloration or camouflage is an adaptation that decreases the risk of detection.
The study of the evolution of camouflage has strongly emphasized the minimization of visual …

It has been proposed that the blue-green bird egg colourations of many avian species may
constitute a sexually selected female signal that males can use to modulate their parental …

Camouflage is widespread throughout the animal kingdom allowing individuals to avoid
detection and hence save time and energy rather than escape from an approaching …

Despite major differences between human and avian colour vision, previous studies of
cuckoo egg mimicry have used human colour vision (or standards based thereon) to assess …