Masters of camouflage Lesson 189 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 15 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
0 Camouflage means looking like your surroundings so that hunters, or the animals you hunt, do not notice you, like a child in a green jumper hiding in a hedge during hide-and-seek. 1 Some animals copy a thing: a stick insect looks like a twig, a potoo bird like a broken stump, a leafy seadragon like floating seaweed and an orchid mantis like a pink flower. 2 Others change: a cuttlefish switches colour and pattern in less than a second, and a flounder matches the sea floor, while a decorator crab simply dresses itself in sponge and seaweed. 4 The leafy seadragon has leaf-shaped flaps all over its body and drifts slowly among seaweed, and seadragon fathers carry the eggs on their tails until they hatch. 5 Stick insects look like twigs and sway like branches in the wind, and the longest insect in the world is a Chinese stick insect over sixty centimetres long. 6 The potoo sits still on a branch looking exactly like a dead stump, and even with its eyes shut it can see through notches in its eyelids. 7 Cuttlefish change colour and pattern in less than a second using skin cells that stretch and shrink, and they can ripple moving stripes over their bodies, which may confuse prey. 8 An octopus, a cousin of the cuttlefish, normally has eight arms and can change colour and blend into rocks and walls too. 9 The orchid mantis looks like a flower, catches insects that come to it, and some insects are even more attracted to it than to real flowers. 10 Flounders change colour to match the sea floor and bury themselves in sand, and as they grow both eyes move to one side of the head. 11 Many moths rest still on trees looking like bark, and when factory soot darkened trees, dark moths survived better than pale ones. 12 Tigers' stripes break up their outline in tall grass and shadows, deer cannot see orange well, and no two tigers have the same stripes. 13 The owl butterfly has big eye spots like an owl's eyes that may scare off birds, and many butterflies have eye spots to confuse predators. 14 The frogfish looks like a sponge or rock, waits for fish and swallows them quickly, even fish as big as itself. 15 Decorator crabs stick bits of sponge and seaweed on their shells to hide, and they change their decorations when they move to a new place. ← previous Record-breakers: the most venomous and poisonousnext → Strange discoveries: living fossils, hidden apes and animals found in drawers↑ back to Biology This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/