The Amazing Master Of Disguise Is Not Man ,It Is……..

Different animal species have evolved a number of  ways to hide in their environment One of the most popular tactics is by camouflage, often by matching the background or by having patterns that break up the animal’s outline (think: zebras and leopards).

Others have evolved to resemble other species that are generally toxic or venomous, in a technique called mimicry.

But a few amazing species have been recently discovered to have the ability to alter their mimicry to actively imitate a range of species, depending on their circumstances.

The most remarkable of these is the mimic octopus, which shifts its shape and behavior to mimic a number of different species .

The mimic octopus was discovered in 1998 off the coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia. They live on the shallow sandy bottoms near river mouths, which are extremely exposed habitats with lots of predators.

They spend much of their time looking out from their burrows and foraging along the sandy bottoms in mottled drab brown colors that blend with their surroundings. This camouflage technique does a good job hiding them from predators as long as they don’t move too much.

Animal vision is often fooled by colors and patterns that blend in with the surroundings… until the image moves. Our strong movement detection abilities will quickly bring a moving camouflaged animal into focus.

So how could a soft-bodied animal safely move around an exposed and predator-rich environment?

The mimic octopus has a brilliant solution to this problem. When swimming in the open-water, they take on black and white bands and trail their arms behind them like the flared poisonous spines of a lion-fish.

When moving rapidly from place to place, they turn the mottled brown of the sandy bottom, arrange their arms in a leaf-shape and undulate their bodies along the contours of the sand, swimming like a sole, a populous and poisonous flatfish in the area.

And when attacked by small and fiercely territorial damselfish, they hide six of their arms in a hole and raise the other two in opposite directions, now with thick black and beige bands, appearing like a venomous banded sea-snake.

And this isn’t all. SCUBA divers report mimic octopuses resembling anenomes, jellyfish, mantis shrimp, feather stars, brittle stars, giant crabs, seahorses, crocodile snake eels, stingrays, and nudibranchs. These imitations have yet to be scientifically verified, but the potential is astounding!

Wow! That really is something, and i thought the chameleon was a master disguise artist! Talk about learning everyday. Hmmmn

 

credit www.nature.com