Abstract
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, including background matching, disruptive coloration, countershading and masquerade. By contrast, much less attention has been paid to how predators might overcome these defences. Such strategies include the evolution of more acute senses, the co-opting of other senses not targeted by camouflage, changes in cognition such as forming search images, and using behaviours that change the relationship between the cryptic individual and the environment or disturb prey and cause movement. Here, we evaluate the methods through which visual camouflage prevents detection and recognition, and discuss if and how predators might evolve, develop or learn counter-adaptations to overcome these.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Signal detection theory in recognition systems: from evolving models to experimental tests'.
Highlights
Natural systems are visually noisy environments with each scene comprising a huge variety of colours, textures, shapes and perspectives that must be processed by an observer
Note that some camouflage strategies can work against other modalities, but we mostly focus on visual ones here since these have received by far the most attention
All strategies exploit some aspect of visual processing and/or cognition and often act to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), whereby cues from the camouflaged individual constitute the signal and additional factors that interfere with the true identification of the signal comprise noise
Summary
Natural systems are visually noisy environments with each scene comprising a huge variety of colours, textures, shapes and perspectives that must be processed by an observer. All strategies exploit some aspect of visual processing and/or cognition and often act to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), whereby cues from the camouflaged individual constitute the signal and additional factors that interfere with the true identification of the signal comprise noise. Work focused predominantly on predator behaviours such as search rates and aspects of attention in finding hidden prey (see [13,14] for discussion) but neglected how camouflage itself works and the types of camouflage strategy that exist (i.e. prey defences). We bring these various avenues of research together. We briefly review recent advances in how camouflage prevents detection and recognition, discuss if and how predators might overcome these strategies and conclude by identifying several areas for future research
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