Do you enjoy playing hide and seek with your friends?

Well, animals and birds also play a game of hide and seek in nature. Only for them it is not a game. It is a means of survival either to get food by hunting or to hide from being hunted!

One of the most common ways animals hide is to have a colour that is similar to their habitat(place where they live). This is called camouflage. A well known example is the stripes of the tiger which are coloured and patterned such that a tiger will be almost invisible behind tall grass in the jungle.

Here we see how a Rock Agama, a lizard, makes itself invisible on a rock.

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Can you spot where it is in the picture below?

Quite difficult, isn’t it?

To check if you are right, read more below…

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The Rock Agama is at the bottom right of the the picture.

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The Rock Agama is a lizard which spends time mostly on the boulders having grey, black and white streaked patterns. So, its skin is also coloured similarly making it invisible when sitting on these rocks.

Since Rock Agama’s are hunted by raptors (birds of prey or which eat other animals) such as Eagles and Kites, this type of camouflage is very useful to avoid getting spotted by them from high up in the air. It saves the lizard from getting eaten up!

Activity: If you come across any funnily colored animal, reptile or bird, try to think and guess why it has chosen that pattern. In nature everything has a reason.

 

Further Reading: