Review: November 2009

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Have you ever noticed that field mice have dark-colored backs and light-colored bellies? It’s the same with a great many animals, from brook trout to beagles. It was a New England artist, Abbott H. Thayer, who first figured out why. In 1896, he submitted an article to the natural history journal The Auk in which he proposed that the pattern is a form of camouflage. The bellies of animals, which are usually shaded by their bodies, would appear darker than their backs if not light-colored or white to compensate for daytime backs thus help animals appear more uniform in sunlight, and make it harder for predators to spot them. Thayer claimed to have become aware of that protective coloration because of his own difficulties in sketching animals in the wild.

In a revealing and entertaining review of mimicry and camouflage in nature, art, and war, journalist Peter Forbes explores a wide range of eye-fooling strategies, such as the one discovered by Thayer. There are fish called sea dragons that masquerade as fronds of seaweed, spiders that resemble bird droppings, and leaf butterflies that, when perched on a branch, are indistinguishable from foliage.

Not all protective strategies involve hiding in plain sight, however. The larva of the elephant hawk moth, when threatened, contracts its body to resemble the head of a large snake, an effective deterrent to a hungry bird. And what’s fair for prey is also fair for predators: the Malayan praying mantis (Hymenopus bicornis), to give one example, is a dead ringer for a local flower (Melastoma polyanthum) that is frequented by bees. All a mantis has to do is sit quietly on an M. polyanthum bush, and dinner will come buzzing right into its clutches.

Animals don’t adopt disguises consciously, of course, the way a hunter dons camos on the first day of deer season. Forbes rightly portrays camouflage and mimicry as examples of how natural selection can act in subtle and surprising ways. His book will open your eyes to aspects of the natural world that may have passed you by, unnoticed.