The strategies underlying different forms of protective coloration are well understood but little
attention has been paid to the ecological, life‐history and behavioural circumstances under …

The visual pigments known as opsins are the primary molecular basis for colour vision in
animals. Insects are among the most diverse of animal groups and their visual systems …

Optical transparency is rare in terrestrial organisms, and often originates through loss of
pigmentation and reduction in scattering. The coloured wings of some butterflies and moths …

Substantial progress has been made in the past 15 years regarding how prey use a variety
of visual camouflage types to exploit both predator visual processing and cognition …

Camouflage patterns prevent detection and/or recognition by matching the background,
disrupting edges, or mimicking particular background features. In variable habitats, however …

In water, transparency seems an ideal concealment strategy, as testified by the variety of
transparent aquatic organisms. By contrast, transparency is nearly absent on land, with the …

The wings of butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) are typically covered with thousands of flat,
overlapping scales that endow the wings with colorful patterns. Yet, numerous species of …

Imperfect mimicry may be maintained when the various components of an aposematic signal
have different salience for predators. Experimental laboratory studies provide robust …

Müllerian mimicry is a positive interspecific interaction, whereby co-occurring defended prey
species share a common aposematic signal. In Lepidoptera, aposematic species typically …

Lepidoptera—a group of insects in which wing transparency has arisen multiple times—
exhibits much variation in the size and position of transparent wing zones. However, little is …