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Many plants and animals possess some form of camouflage, for many reasons. Natural camouflage can involve many different senses, including sight, smell, touch, and sound. The reasons for camouflage are primarily to deceive predators or prey, but camouflage can serve to aid reproduction. Some animals are even capable of adapting their appearance to match their environment.
Here are some of the strategies used in the animal world.
Mimicry (or mimetism) describes a situation where a group of organisms, the mimics, have evolved to share common perceived characteristics with another group, the models.
Three majors forms of mimicry are used by animals:
Self-mimicry, Mullerian and Batesian mimicry.
Countershading is the process of using lighter colors on normally dark areas, and darker colors on normally light areas. This removes some of the visual cues used for depth perception, causing the countershaded object to appear flat, rather than as an object with depth.
The best exemple of countershading is the Great White Shark. His white bottom prevent to see it from under and the darker top blend it with the dark water when looked from the top.
Disruptive camouflage is not intended to blend into the environment, and in fact often involves bright, eye-catching colors that would be the antithesis of cryptic camouflage. Disruptive camouflage seeks to confuse the observer, by providing visual cues that override the camouflaged object's features. This prevents the observer from accurately identifying characteristics of the camouflaged object(s), such as shape, size, orientation, and number of objects in a group.
A good exemple of disruptive camouflage is ink used by octopuses.
Cryptic camouflage is an attempt to blend into the environment and become effectively imperceptible. To do this, the camouflaged object must minimize observable differences between itself and the background with respect to the senses of the target observer. The definitive example of camouflage is a cryptic camouflage designed to match the visual appearance of the expected background, generally using a mottled pattern of greens and browns to match ground and foliage color and break up the outline of the camouflaged object.
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