Unlike animals, plants may be limited in their use of camouflage by the fact that chlorophyll - which they need to live via photosynthesis - is green.Īs a result, the researchers say it may sometimes be a disadvantage to a plant to be any other colour - meaning their camouflage comes at a cost. For example, some coastal and dune plants get covered by sand because of their sticky glandular trichomes, making them less conspicuous. Decoration - accumulating material from the environment.
Examples include living stones, some cacti, passion vines and mistletoes. Masquerade - looking like something else usually something a predator might ignore, such a stone or twig.Disruptive coloration - markings that create the appearance of false edges and boundaries, making it harder to see the true outline.Background matching - blending with the colours of shapes of the habitat where they live.Professor Hang Sun, also of the Kunming Institute of Botany, added: "We noticed that just in the alpine region of south-west China, camouflage has evolved in plants from more than 15 families."Įxamples of camouflage methods apparently used by both plants and animals include: Those individuals with worse colour matching might have higher risk of being eaten."
Plant camouflage how to#
"It seems that plants like these know how to make the right colours by mixing a few types of pigments. The adaptations might happen in the long term by evolution. "We can't yet be certain about how they do this. "Different populations of this species look different in different places. "These plants are a wonderful example of how camouflage can be adapted for different habitats," said first author Dr Yang Niu, of the Kunming Institute of Botany (Chinese Academy of Sciences) and Exeter. One species that uses masquerade camouflage is Corydalis hemidicentra, a plant whose leaves match the colour of rocks where it grows. "We now need to discover just how important a role camouflage has in the ecology and evolution of plants." "From 'decoration', where they accumulate things like dust or sand on their surface, to disruptive coloration, they use many of the same methods as animals to camouflage themselves. "It is clear that plants do more than entice pollinators and photosynthesise with their colours - they hide in plain sight from enemies too," said Professor Martin Stevens, of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall. These include blending with the background, "disruptive colouration" (using high-contrast markings to break up the perceived shape of an object) and "masquerade" (looking like an unimportant object predators might ignore, such as a stone).
Research on plant camouflage is limited compared to the wealth of knowledge about how animals conceal themselves.īut a review by scientists from the University of Exeter and the Kunming Institute of Botany (Chinese Academy of Sciences) found plants use a host of techniques long known to be used by animals.
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