How Animal Camouflage Works

because of all the junk in it. No, but have you ever looked into that condition It's a metabolic conditioning where it's like you can't have protein basically, but you also have to live interesting. Yeah, it's it sounds terrible. I know. You can clean a toilet with candy soda and you can make a penny shiny overnight. Yeah. You can loosen um rusted nuts and bolts. Yeah, or you can drink it. Right. That's the most delicious move is

go juice. It is go juice of the type you know me, I like my orange soda every now and then they'll like the wippony lou that in a root beer is about all roos. Great. What about cream soda? Yeah, you're not a big cream soda now, it's fine. I'll have I have one of those every two years. I'll have it's about five root beers a year and about teneam in your fridge with like a little bit of masking tape so they're numbered. No, I don't buy them to keep them in the house. They just you should.

It's probably cheaper by Yeah, and this is not a big statement on health and wellness. My family didn't buy that stuff growing up because we were you know, they were teachers and we didn't have a ton of money and would drink water, just water, a lot of water to real especially in restaurants. We'll just have water. Yeah, that kind of deal because the other stuff costs money. But in retrospect, I'm glad, you know, because I never developed a big affinity for SODA's. Yeah. No, it's pretty

great for your mom. Yeah, so thanks mom for the for the milk and water way to go. So Chuck, I would say this is a perfect segue to what we're talking about today. Animal camouflage. Yeah, we covered a little bit of the uh this in the Coolest Animal Ever, The Octopus podcast. Yeah. We also talked about your descence

I think, yeah, and how to butterfly wings get their color? Yeah, that was you know when people say, like, what's an episode that that everybody overlooks that you thought it was great? There's like fifty of them at least more like Um, but I would say that the butterfly wings episode is a really startling example of that where it's just like, you think it's gonna be boring, but it led us into all sorts of stuff optics, color, butterflies, migration, like

all sorts of really cool stuff light. Yeah. Um, that one turned out to be really neat. Yeah, and you know what you just reminded me. Um, we should mention that we have close to seven hundred podcasts now, we're really close and a lot of people that maybe find us via iTunes or another pod player, thank you, might we might only have like three hundred. Yeah, it's funny to see that triumphant tweet, like, just listen to all three episodes of Steven should know my life is completely like,

oh boy, I'm so sorry. You got a long road to home. But you can find all those we have an RSS if you just google stuff. You should Know RSS, or go to our website Stuff you should dot Com click under podcasts. We have all seven hundred of them there. Yeah, you can also search stuff you Should Know archive and it should bring up the archive page on our website, which has every single episode of Stuff you Should Know ever, and I think you can download them there too, can't

you think? So who knows in this day and age twenty one century, it's right, So animal camouflaged chuckers. Yes. Also, I want to give a shout out to a board panda um article twenty amazing examples of animal animal camouflage. It's nuts. Some of the stuff these animals are doing these days. It's pretty cool. And you know, I because they want to live. Yeah, it's natural selection at work, which is kind of like it's happening right in front of our eyes. We've covered natural selection at length in

that episode, in the Darwin episode. But as we all know, if an animal gets munched on or stomped on, it's not gonna be around. So it adapts into the world around me and says, hey, I think I might want to look like that twig or might want to blend in color wise, then I won't get eaten and I'm gonna pass that down to my kids and they won't get eaten, and all of a sudden, we're a healthy,

thriving species. Yeah. And through natural selection, an animal that has a trait that keeps it from being eaten allows it to, say, blend in. It raises the likelihood that it will live long enough to reproduce to pass it on. And on the other hand, an animal that say, rightly colored and stands out in its environment, it's probably gonna get picked off early on won't have a chance to reproduce,

so whatever traits it has won't necessarily be passed along. Yeah, and that's why almost every animal that you'll see on the planet Earth has some sort of blending in capability. Um. Not always. You know, you'll see a big blue bird in the middle of the woods obviously you're a cardinal, but you'll also see a lot of deer and squirrels and ground mammals that are sort of browny and gray. Yeah, it's not because they're just drabbed, because there again trying

to survive exactly. They blend in with those earth tones. And if you look in the ocean, um, you will see some crazy fluorescent things, but you're also going to see a lot of blue grayish coloring um and sea creatures because they'll blend into the light, that soft light under the water. And one of the reasons why animal camouflage is so widespread and adaptation is because it doesn't just help you from being hunted yourself. It helps you to hunt. You can use it to capture prey as

well as hide from predators. So it's just really versatile and great fantastic stuff can help you kill and not be killed exactly, just the whole key. So Um, there's a couple of different ways where there's some factors involved in how animal camouflage will develop within a given species. Um. First and foremost, it depends on how the animal behaves, and it's physiology. Yeah, like, uh, if your mammal, obviously

your fur is gonna play a large part. If you're a fish or an amphibian, your scales, your skin might write. If you're traveling big packs, you might use that to your advantage, or if you're a solo flyer, you might find a way to work that into your routine, your survival routine. Yeah, So I mean the animal itself, the camouflage, it develops what type of animal it is and how it behaves. Those are going to have a huge impact.

So too will the environment. Probably more than anything else, the environment will um predict how the animals camouflage will develop, because what you want to do is blend into the background, and so the natural habitat, the environment that the animal lives in will become the model for the camouflage. Yeah. Like, if you're surrounded by green, you're probably gonna be green um or you might be dead soon. Uh. The other is the final way is the physiology and behavior of

the predators and prey that seek those animals out for lunch. So, for instance, if the your main predator is color blind, then you're not gonna mess with changing color. You might alter over time, just like maybe the stripe pattern on your body, or it's about pattern not color necessarily. So the your own physiology and behavior, the behavior and I guess physiology of your predators or your prey, and then the actual environment that you and have it. These are

the big three when it comes to determining animal camouflage. Yeah, and most of the camouflage that we see around us all balls under the banner. Of blending in to your surroundings just being casual. Um. And then there's basically two ways. Colors is huge, it's not the only thing, but it's one of the bigger points of animal camouflage. And then there's two ways that color is produced here on planet

Earth by animals, and it's either chemically or physically. And chemically, colors are produced through pigments, that's right, biochromes their microscopic natural pigments, and they are they produce these colors chemically, and for instance, your chemical makeup might absorb some colors of light reflect others. That's gonna make you appear to be a different color or be a different color, right exactly. So, Like, um, I looked up human pigment, human pigmentation to see if

that was an example of camouflage. Couldn't find anything. It wasn't like one of those ones where you do a Google searching you're like, oh, this is obviously a dumb question. This was like there just hasn't been a lot of academic study on it or whatever for humans. Yeah, like if brown skin or peach skin, yeah, interesting. I think what it is ultimately is just an adaptation to the exposure to the sun rather than trying to blend in with your environment. That makes sense, but I wondered I

got my answer. I guess through the fact that there wasn't an answer, all right. The other way you mentioned was actually physical structures, and these are also microscopic and they act like prisms. And one example they gave in the article was polar bears, who actually have black skin, but they have translucent hairs, and the translucent hair turns all visible light into a rainbow, which is why polar bears look like rainbow colored. Well, I don't think that's true.

It's like on the Pink Flood album cover. Yeah, that's a polar bear, right right, that's a polar bear hair that prism. Not true. No, but apparently they have black skin underneath, but their hair manages to bend and reflect all light, almost all lights, so they appear white and the nuts. But it's almost like, why why not just have the darker skin evolve out just because the hair made it so it didn't need to. Maybe I wonder if it serves some other purpose. Yeah, maybe this good

question polar bear experts. Yeah, but just someone's gonna know, please let us know. Um, Butterflies also have um physical structures. Scales are also a physical structure because they do crazy things to light. And then some animals have both chemical and physical structures that create their camouflage. Apparently a lot of reptiles are green because they have physical structures that bend light and reflect light except up for say yellow.

But then they have pigments underneath the skin that create blue or vice versa. Probably now that I say it out loud, and then you put the two together and you have green, which helps for a snake that lives

in bright green trees. Yeah, and all of these um, all these animals have their own method I guess, and with their physiology, like obviously mammals have their fur um, fish um, amphibians, reptiles, they're gonna use their scales, birds have their feathers, and even insects use their exoskeleton um, which can actually like the texture of the exoskeleton can be changed over time to better blend in. Yeah, right,

Like think about the the wings on grasshopper. They look a lot like a leaf, right, But one of the reasons they look like a leaf is not just because of the color, but because of the texture it's got kind of this math thing. If they were like a high shine polish, the thing would stand out pretty pretty clearly. So it's not just color. It's also texture as well and patterns as we'll see. But color is probably the

most widespread part of animal camouflage. And apparently a squirrel, the squirrels fur is rough and uneven to resemble the texture of tree bark. Makes sense. Yeah, I never really noticed that I can spot a squirrel a mile away though. Well that's because there's like a zillion of them in Atlanta because I hate them. Woh, that's right. So we'll talk more about animal colors and all the neat stuff

that can happen right after this message. All right, we're back, and we are talking about changing of the seasons now, because animals will change themselves depending on the change of the seasons. They can actually adapt to the seasons to blend in. Do you see how acutely fought are Look how cute that foxes? That's the same type of fox. I love foxes like. So, the Arctic fox lives in a u an environment, a habitat where some of the year it's snowy, other parts of the year it's um Well,

woody and muddy. Yeah, and so as a result, the Arctic fox has evolved to change its coat depending on the season. Yeah, that's a sharp adaptation. It's pretty awesome. And it's actually triggered by hormones. The the animal senses the changing in the season because of like the shift in daylight, maybe shifts in temperature, and they'll release hormones and there'll be a reaction and all of a sudden, there are different biochromes being produced in that little fox

can change color right there. They're making different pigments. Pigments. The thing is um and some bird species do this too, but well, not a lot of mammals, but some mammals will change their coat. The thing is that you can't or the fox or the bird can't do anything to change its actual coat. Once the oat has grown out, it has to shed its coat or malt its feathers and then regrow new ones that better match the new things. So that's why um. Apparently a lot of mammals malt

is to change the color of their coat. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. It is pretty awesome. Have you ever seen the videos of the pet foxes on the internet. Yeah, man, they're very cute, little fluffy tails wagon and like those little chirpy noises they make when they get betted. Yes, that one in particular adorable. Uh and then chuck. Um. Have you heard about the peppered moth. I don't think so you have. It's the sterling example of natural selection

in practice. But it's based on um camouflage. So in London during the Industrial Revolution that's London, England. Yes, okay, it became so sooty that um the white bodied peppered moth, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's kind of peppery looking. It looks like if it landed on the side of a birch tree, you know, the white ones, it would just blend right in because of this mixture

of white and black. The thing is, is there so much soot produced during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in London that this these moths that had any white to them would stand out like a sore thumb and we're predated eaten. Uh. There was a variation on this called the black bodied peppered moth didn't change because of the soot. So the thing is is the animal itself

didn't change. Different varieties of the same species. One was eaten, one thrived because of the change in the amount of soot, but it happened very quickly. How do they know they just weren't white moss covered with soot. They're they're pretty sure they weren't. And then now that the soot has been whipped largely in London um, the white bodied pepper moth is now predominant again because it can blend in a lot more easily because there's less soot because London

cleaned up act in some ways? What way says it not? I don't know. They like to drink a lot, they really they do. But don't they stop at like eleven? Now? I don't just remember we started drinking at four and then they drink for several hours, but then they stopped at eleven, like the bars aren't open all night or something. Yeah. The only time I went to London, I just remember thinking, man,

they really do drink a lot. This is great. And I remember buying beer can beer in the store and I was like, oh, they've got its tall boys and they're like, what's the tall boy? Right, Like we just call that a beer that's a short Yeah, that you should see our tall boys. You call them kegs. I can't wait to go back. We're hoping, spoiler, We're hoping to maybe come to London for a show. Fingers crossed. All right, So where were we? Oh, we were talking

about bio biochromes. Uh, those are the cells on this near to the skin surface, or in the case of the octopus or the cuttlefish, you can have deeper cells called chromatophors, which we talked about at length in the octopus episode, and those are amazing. Those are pigmented cells that the octopus and the cuttlefish can basically manipulate these cells and contract and expand these things, like the surface area can expand up to when they want to show

that particular pigment. Yeah, and a good uh. I don't know if we had mentioned this and the last octopus one, but a good way to see this in action is to take like a balloon, like a red balloon, and just blow it up a little bit and tie it off. You know, if you squeeze that balloon, it's gonna change its color, it's gonna become lighter. And then when you unsqueeze it or let it go, it's gonna go back

to that dark red. And that's kind of the same thing that's going on with the manipulation of the caromatophor, right, And that's different shades of it's of the same color, but they have different camatophores of totally different colors and then call up what they want, right. Yeah, So if they want like all black, they could reduce the size

of everything but black and just show the black. But they can also mix and match to create colors that are basically a bland and of their different colored chromatophores. So if they are blue and yellow and they're showing those equally, they'll have a nice healthy shade of green overall. And with cuttle fish in particular, they've done some recent study and they found that not only do they have chromatophores, they have two other structures that help too. They have lucophors,

which scatter light very efficiently. Then they also have aritophores, which produce iridescence. So that's why it's not just like a flat color change. It's like these are it's like magic. When you see an octopus quick change color or cuttle fish, Yeah, it looks like they it looks like it's just become a completely different animal, not just colorwise, but texture and all that is all just optical illusions. Yeah, the the

octopus can shape texture and color. And a second, it's not like I mean, if you've seen the video, it's not the kind of thing that's like, oh it's changing now. I mean you blink your eyes and it's a underwater plant. Exactly. What's nuts, though, Chuck, is they've studied the cuttle fish and it's just color they're changing. Maniac cuttle fish are

color blind. They have no idea. They know that it's visually driven because they've deprived it of visual cues before and shown that it's not quite as adept at changing its colors, so they know that it's it's visually driven, but they have no idea how a cuttle fish can tell what color to change too, because it's color blind. Isn't that cool? Well? Maybe I don't know. There's no mirrors down there. Maybe they don't even know what color is. Maybe not. Maybe it's all some other sense that we've

yet to discover. Yeah, the cuddle sense cuddle, Um, I guess we can. I know we mentioned this in another one about the chameleon that may have been or is that it don't be dumb episode that chameleons don't change their color to blend in. They actually change color depending on their mood. I've not done that one. I heard that, I think for the first time a couple of years ago. I had always thought, like a lot of people, that the chameleon, you know, lands on something green, it's gonna

turn green. As far as any paink commercial I've ever seen for through chameleon, that's the story, you know. Yeah, But they, like I said, they change when their mood changes. Um, and not necessarily depending on their surroundings. Right, so they're basically showing like I'm happy, I'm fluorescent orange. Right now, let's go uh, let's go to happy hour. Um. So, so far, we've got hormonal changes to either changes in temperature or changes in sunlight leading to molting or shedding

a fur in a new coat. Um, you've got some sort of visually driven behavior in some pretty amazing animals like the octopus or the cuttlefish. Um, you've got chameleons changing based on their mood, which again I guess would probably be hormonally triggered. And then you've also got some that changed their color their camouflage based on diet, like the nudy branch, or as I like to call it, the nudy brand, the nuty branch. Did you look at these? No? Amazing.

It's one of those like super brilliant, fluorescent, very colorful things. Um. And they are sea creatures and they alter their diet depending on what kind of coral um they are near. They will eat that coral and deposit that pigmentum from the coral into their skin and their intestines, and it'll just change the color to blend in with what they're eating. Basically, yeah, because what they're eating is also what they're living on.

So when they eat a specific type of coral and that changes their color, they blend in with their surroundings. Pretty ingenious, smart nudy branches. Way to go. There are also fish who change color without changing their diet um, and that is sort of like the malting and mammals and birds the fish and this this is something that happens over time. It's not like I'll eat and change colors.

But if the fish changes environment as a species, it's going to get new queues and look around and say, well, I might want to think about turning a little more green over time as a specie, and I want to think about that. So I'm gonna release some hormones and maybe over time, my my sons and my son's sons might eventually really blend in well. And oh grab when it comes to shark yah hide exactly have you heard of the glass frog? Uh, it's neat. It's translucent, so

you can see its internal organs very clearly. Um. But I was like, what what adaptation is that? Seriously, like, how does that figure with with animal camouflage? And um, no, one's sure, there's no definitive answer, but it seems like the best theory I saw was that, Um, it's translucent skin makes it invisible. Oh really, uh huh, which makes sense because it's guts are green and I think it's a tree frog, so it's it's invisible, I guess to some predators, or maybe it just wants to be a

part of the body's exhibit really badly. It looks like that it's the frog version of the invisible man man. I'll have to check that out. So we'll talk more about some other uses for camouflage. Right after this, we talked about coloration and stuff, like that, but they're also designs. Um the animals can use to blend in, and that is the model pattern that they're using. Like let's say a zebra stripes. They have those vertical stripes. Yeah, and

it's black and white. And if you go on a safari, probably the first thing you would ever notice is a zebra sticks out like a sore thumb. Look like crazy, we're looking horse that can never be domesticated because they're too wild and too met Um. The thing is, the zebra is not camouflaged for you. It doesn't care about you or your family. It cares about the lions that's

funding it. And lions are color blind, so they can't see that a zebras black and white and the leaves and grass that's blending in with our own and khaki and greens, or it just sees the pattern, which is the whole point. Yeah. And then the other cool thing about zebra stripes is they are specific to the zebra. It's like a fingerprint, so they help them identify each other or maybe the pack like, oh, look at that pack, that's not my pack because those stripes are not my stripes, right,

is pretty interesting? Or this is uh king seraphon king of the zebras, and I can tell it's him because of his stripes. And by the way, I when I say pack, I mean heard, heard, You're right to save your emails. Well, what's neat is so zebras do work in herds or live in herds, and they use stripes to identify one another, like a mom will be able to keep an eye on her kid. Chure full um from a ways off, because to a zebra, it's plainly obvious that that's our kid. It doesn't look like anything

else to us, you know, it looks exactly the same. Um. But another another adaptive measure of the animal camouflage of zebras is that since they do exist in herds, it makes it really hard for a lion to pick out what the heck is going on when you've got a herd of zebras, because their stripes are running into each other and you can't tell which zebras ends where, begins where, and uh, it makes it harder for them to pick out like the weak and the injured. Yeah, and that's

the same truth a lot of stripe fish. Um. A shark might just see a big blob of stripy things and not realize. And that's why it's you know, they travel in schools, not the only reason, but to help themselves look larger and just sort of blend in as a big gelatinous stripe e fluorescent thing exactly because they're kind of like, well, there's no way that a shark's not going to see the school of fish, or there's no way a lion is not gonna see this herd

of zebras. But we can make it really difficult for this predator to create a good attack strategy because this is very confusing, that's right, And that's called disruptive coloration. It's pretty neat um trick that they use. Another thing they can use is what they call visual disruption. Visual Yeah, I see that, funny. That's typically how it's pronounced. It

sounded weird coming out of my mess. Yeah. Uh. This is when patterns are out of line with the body's contours, so it looks like, um, someone has thrown some sort of projection, uh, superimposed on top of that animal, right, or it looks like it really just blends in with the the grasses or whatever that it's walking along, rather than if it did follow the contours would be like, oh, well, look at that zebra right there standing in the grass,

right exactly. Another cool thing that animals can do is imitation or mimicry. And this is when they say, you know what, I I can't manage being ignored. I'm not that good, but at least I can um be seen. I can't manage to not be seen because I'm not that good. But maybe I can manage to be ignored. Yeah, Like, I'm a walking stick insect. And they're so cool because they look so much like twigs and sticks, and that's

what they're trying to do. They're like, well, I know you see me, but hopefully you just think I'm a stick. It's funny. It looks like a stick with the head of a beaker from the Muppets. Yeah. Um, the Katie did is another one. You ever seen those? They look like leaves? Yeah, like really green leaves. Yeah. Um? Did you see the hawk moth caterpillar? Yeah, that's one of my favorites. It is awesome. I was like, what do you mean it looks like a snake? Come on, And

then I did a Google image search. Yeah, it looks exactly like a snake. Like I would be freaked out thinking it was a snake and I'm a smart human. Yeah, there's certain photos I've seen. I think maybe the one you found where it compares a snake to this thing. No, I didn't see one compared. It was just on its face. Yeah, team of facey pretty amazing. Yeah, and that is the

hawk moth caterpillar or our favorite moth caterpillar. Oh. Another thing that they can do sometimes if they live in an ecosystem where UM a lot of times, like super poisonous animals are really brightly colored, the non poisonous animals will be like, you know what, everyone's ignoring that guy because if they eat it, he will die. So over time, let's ourselves evolved to have bright colors even though we're not poisonous, so we can look like that dude that

is poisonous. False flag camouflage brilliant, brilliant color mimicry. So, chuck, you got anything else? I got nothing else. That was animal camouflage. One of our great UM animal episodes. Those are always fun. They made me feel like a kid. Yeah, I mean, I agreed. You know, Uh, if you want to learn more about animal camouflage, you should type those words into the search bar, how stuff works dot com. Don't forget the you. And since I said that, it's

time for listener mail Greetings from Connecticut. That's what I'll call this, because Christina lives in Connecticut, or as I like to say, Connecticut, and so I'll remember how to spell it. Why does that see in there? It's sort of weird. M. I don't know. Yeah. I want to thank you guys for your podcasts on bipolar disorder. I've struggled with this since I was first diagnosed at eighteen with bipolar two. I always said I got the short into the stick and disorders, as I suffer from only

small bouts of highs and long bouts of loads. Most recently, I suffered a nervous breakdown due distress from work. I'm currently on medical lead from work. My bipolar has progressed to hallucinations, which are not fun. I see something that my mind is trying to tell myself isn't really there, but the anxiety and fear that uh, it's really there overcomes me. My family's old school and chooses to ignore it. Old school. That's one way to say that, um, and

act like it isn't happening. UM. I should also add but I come from a family of medical professionals and therapists. Wow, that doesn't make sense. No, that's very surprised. They're like, absolutely, honey, there's a clown with a knife coming at you. For sure. That doesn't seem like a good strategy. No, not at all. I set your podcast to my family, though, and it allowed us to have an open conversation about what is

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