1. Camouflage and Mimicry

2. Hide & Seek
Have you ever wondered why animals have spots, strips, or certain colors?
Sometimes an animal’s colors can be a difference between life and death.
Animals use their colors to blend into the environment.
What is this called?

3. What Is Camouflage?

4. How do animals protect themselves in the wild?
Color or pattern allows the animal to blend into the environment

5. Wild animals are shy and always hiding
Wild animals are shy and always hiding. It is natural for them to be this way.

6. They stay behind whatever is available – a thin tree trunk or even a single blade of grass.

7. Their colors and patterns match the colors and patterns of the places where they live.

8. Because of this protective coloration, called camouflage, animals can hide by simply staying still and blending in.

9. Adaptations Camouflage is a type of animal adaptation.
What is an adaptation?
An adaptation is something that helps animals survive better.

10. Find the animals!
See if you can find the camouflaged animals in these pictures. The animals you are looking for are a deer, frog, and quail.
Quail

11. Look closely to find this animal!
Deer!

12. Can you see the frog?

14. Walking stick

15. These two katydids sitting on a tomato plant are well camouflaged.

20. But… Not all the insects do camouflage.
Then how they survive?

22. Mimicry Animals may also try to look like other animals.
For example, non poisonous snakes will rattle their tale and flatten their head to look poisonous to a predator.
This is called Mimicry, where an animal tries to mimic or copy another.
Which snake is poisonous?

30. Other forms of mimicry…
Another example of mimicry involves the monarch butterfly, which is toxic and very nasty to eat.Its bright orange coloration is a warning to birds to leave it alone. The non-toxic viceroy butterfly has developed colors and wing patterns that are very similar to those of the monarch and so most birds won’t take a chance by taste-testing it!