Be Smart

- Hey, smart people, Joe here.

No, over here.

You just got fooled by camouflage.

You might think your eyes just got tricked, but what I actually just did was take advantage of how your brain has been programmed by millions of years of evolution.

That's something we don't usually think about when it comes to nature's ultimate game of hide and seek.

Camouflage isn't just about what happens on the outside, it's about what happens in here.

Today, we're gonna look at a whole bunch of cool examples of camouflage, find out how they really work, and ask if nature's disguises can help us understand how we and other animals perceive the world.

(playful music) When you think of camouflage, (cat screeching) you probably think of blending into the background, right?

But camouflage actually, comes in many different forms.

Sometimes it's about looking like something else entirely.

Sometimes it's about looking two dimensional.

Sometimes it's about looking confusing.

And yes, sometimes it's about disappearing completely, but although camouflage comes in many forms, they're all part of the same game of hide and seek between predators that want to eat and prey that don't want to be eaten.

In Southern Finland, tawny owls hide out in a mix of woods and farmland.

These birds come in both gray and brown, but until recently, the ones living in Finland were mostly gray, which made them hard to pick out against the snowy background.

But in recent decades, Finland's winter's been getting milder.

There's less snow falling, and the woods now stay brown during many winters.

Now, the light-colored owls stick out against the darker landscape.

Their prey can see them easier, and the owls end up hungry.

So over time, the lighter owls have been dying off and the brown ones are taking over.

This is natural selection at work right before our eyes, and it's a perfect example of the real secret of camouflage, how one animal's camo patterns are actually, shaped by what another animal sees.

Turns out studying what is hidden, is one of our best tools to understand animal minds, including our own, because camouflage, it actually happens in the brain.

Okay, here's the thing about brains.

They love taking shortcuts.

With so much sensory information flooding an animal's brain, they have to pick and choose what they think is important.

For instance, visual creatures like us, we're wired to recognize edges as we scan our environment for interesting objects.

Edges are usually abrupt changes in color or brightness, and they signal to our brain that an object is there.

Our brains are also sensitive to differences in shading, which lets us pick out 3D shapes against a flat background.

So, unless we are actively focused on finding something hidden, our brain takes shortcuts like these and ignores whatever details it thinks it doesn't need.

This frees up lots of bandwidth in our brain, but it also makes us susceptible to certain tricks, because if an animal can somehow hide its edges or its shadows, it can avoid being detected.

And as far as scientists can tell, that's how this works.

A form of camouflage called crypsis.

If you look closely, you'll notice that all of these animals have a couple things in common.

For one, they've got strongly contrasting colors right next to each other, making it look like there are edges within their bodies, and their actual edges are all but invisible, because of the way their colors match parts of the background.

This is a trick called disruptive coloration, and it's amazingly effective at taking advantage of our brain's shortcuts.

These forms of camo also take advantage of our brain's tendency to latch onto patterns.

For example, whatever different elements of our visual field share similar qualities like color or shape, we tend to unconsciously group them together and just assume they're related.

Same thing with elements that are relatively close together.

We also tend to connect the dots and see things as whole, even if parts of the image are missing, take another look at a copperhead snake in these leaves.

Our brain naturally connects the danger noodle's light patches with these light color leaves around them, and it's dark patches with the shadows.

And just like that, the edges disappear and the distinctive nope rope shape is practically invisible.

That snake might as well be a neuroscientist, because it's basically constructed a perfect real life lab experiment to teach us what our mental shortcuts are.

So, that's the form of camouflage that most people are used to, but animals don't even need bold, complicated patterns to pull off a vanishing act.

Check out this bird in the woods or these ibexes in the desert.

They've evolved a completely different strategy for avoiding neural detection algorithms.

You'll notice that animals that typically have the sun shining on their backs, they often have lighter undersides to even out the shadow cast by their bodies.

Since visual systems are wired to zero in on areas with high contrast, this counter shading pattern makes them harder to pick out.

Meanwhile, animals like sloths and this caterpillar larva, which like to hang upside down, they have the opposite shading pattern with lighter backs and darker bellies.

So, quick recap.

Disruptive patterns or a lack of shadows make natural edges harder to see and help disguise animals' form so that they don't jump out as 3D objects.

But here's the most important thing to remember when we see these incredible examples of camouflage in nature, they're not for us.

Most camouflage evolve to fool specific animals that may see the world in very different ways than we do, which means that animals camouflage strategy can give us clues about how its main predator or prey perceive the world.

For instance, an orange tiger trying to hide in green vegetation might seem like an evolutionary oopsie, but the animals that tigers prey on, like deer, only have two types of color sensitive cells in their eyes compared to our three.

Makes it hard for them to tell the difference between red and green.

This hunting camouflage is marketed to take advantage of these specific color-sensing cells in deer's eyes.

So, while your awesome human vision might be able to pick me out, this is what it looks like to them, or at least as close as we can simulate it with our measly technology.

So, unfortunately for the deer, tigers are perfectly camouflaged to their prey.

Crypsis isn't the only way for animals to escape detection though.

As we've seen, camouflage is the ultimate mind game, and the real winning move isn't about disappearing.

It's doing whatever you have to, to no longer register as a threat or a target.

For instance, this Viceroy butterfly doesn't exactly blend in with its surroundings, but it doesn't need to, because it evolved to look like a toxic Monarch butterfly.

Luckily for the Viceroy, predators have learned to avoid Monarchs and anything that looks like them.

This kind of trick making other animals think you're something you're not, is called mimicry, and it's one of the most widespread forms of camouflage in nature.

While some animals like the Viceroy use mimicry to deceive their predators, other mimics use it to deceive their prey.

This ghost mantis cosplays as a dead leaf and the orchid mantis disguises itself as a flower blossom.

Excellent strategies for snatching an unsuspecting meal.

These disguises are so intricately detailed, it can be difficult to imagine that they evolved without the help of some devious artists or sculptor.

Take a look at this Kallima butterfly.

Its ancestors didn't pop out of the cocoon looking exactly like a leaf.

It got this way slowly after generations of little tweaks.

It might be hard to believe, but let me show you how a simple process of natural selection can make this happen.

Let's imagine that these are tasty bugs with different color patterns, and this shredded paper is a bunch of vegetation in the forest.

Now, the red bugs totally stand out, but these just happen to look more like the vegetation around them.

Now, imagine some hungry birds come through looking for a quick snack.

And in no time, most of the red ones are gone.

Now, sure, some of the other ones are gone too, but since there's a lot more of them left to pass on their genes, they become more common in the population.

In future generations, most bugs will still be based on that basic color, but they will randomly vary in other ways.

With whoever's hiding better, surviving more, and having more offspring, all it takes is one variation surviving better than another repeated gazillions of times over millions of years, and you can end up with something that looks so close to an actual leaf that honestly, it boggles the mind.

But many forms of camo don't have to be that exact.

When it comes to mimicry, with a little bit of training even you can easily learn to tell the two animals apart.

But once predators learn that something is inedible, many of them will just steer clear of anything that even remotely resembles that inedible thing.

And this is what makes camouflage so useful as a window into another species' mind.

As natural selection shapes one animal's appearance, the design that emerges tells us something about the mind of who it's hiding from, including how it learns and how it makes meaning of all the visual information around it.

For humans, that's usually the kind of thing we have to learn by using MRIs and fancy experiments.

But when it comes to other animals, we can learn plenty just by studying camouflage.

Whether it's a snake disappearing into leaves or a mantis disguised as a flower blossom, every successful camouflage artist is just trying to eat or not get eaten.

What they don't know is they're also telling us some hidden secrets about how their brains work.