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Co-operative Camouflage or chance appearance?
When you are just a small creature in a world of things that want to eat you, one of the best strategies is to become invisible. No, not literally. But some creatures are so adept at blending into their backgrounds that they may as well be. From birds and octopuses to frogs and caterpillars, creatures all around the world have found ingenious ways to disguise themselves from hungry eyes. Mimicry? Yes!
Cooperative camouflage in the wild
A spider that lives in the rainforests of China has taken it up a notch. The masked crab spider (Thomisus guangxicus) appears to team up to perfect their powers of camouflage mimicry.
Environmental scientists Shi-Mao Wu and Jiang-Yun Gao of Yunnan University have documented a male and a female of the species working together to disguise themselves as a flower. It could be the first time we've ever seen cooperative camouflage in the wild.
Crab spiders are cute, colourful arachnids that pose no danger to humans. They live in environments that match their colouration, disguising themselves as features of leaves or petals. This offers protection against predators, sure, but also gives them another advantage.
Crab spiders do not spin webs; rather, they are ambush predators that lie in wait to snare their own prey as it crosses their paths. They're called crab spiders because their grabby front legs are longer than the others, giving them a similar appearance to their marine namesake. But, in comparison to crabs, crab spiders can have a much more pronounced sexual dimorphism. In the case of the masked crab spider, the male and the female look very different indeed: the male is much smaller than the female, with different, much darker coloration. In fact, this is the case for many crab spider species, leading scientists to wonder what the male's camouflage strategy might be.
In a tropical rainforest in Yunnan, researchers came across two spiders on a Hoya pandurata – a plant with pretty, waxy flowers that have a lighter corolla (the petal part) and darker pistils and stamens. "In the above image, where the male crab spider lies on the back of the conspecific female, the male appears to mimic a flower's pistils and stamens while the female appears to mimic that same flower's fused corolla," they write in their description of the encounter. "The flower's complex colour is matched as a whole only when individual spiders of both sexes are present."
This discovery is the first documented case of cooperative mimicry.
It's unclear, however, whether this is the case. The stacked spiders could have just been a coincidental happenstance. Or the spiders could have been engaged in mating behaviour. We could find out by continuing to observe the spiders, and other species of crab spider with similar sexual dimorphism, to see if the behaviour repeats and can be linked to camouflage. Clues might also lie in the molecular clocks of both species. If plant and spider are found to have co-evolved, Wu and Gao say, this could provide some clues about their fascinating behaviour.
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fee.2721
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Mimicry: Baby birds behaving like caterpillars to escape predators
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How a hummingbird chick acts like a caterpillar to survive
The day-old bird, smaller than a pinky finger, had brown fuzz all over its body. When Falk and Taylor walked closer to the nest, the chick began twitching and shaking its head—a behavior they had never seen in birds before.
It turns out the hummingbird might fend off predators by mimicking a poisonous caterpillar that lives in the same region. In a new paper published March 17 in Ecology
Jay J. Falk et al, Potential caterpillar mimicry in a tropical hummingbird, Ecology (2025). DOI: 10.1002/ecy.70060
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Mimicry: A fake spider at the tip of this snake's tail helps it lure birds
Lots of animals use mimicry to survive. Some copy the appearance of threatening predators, and others have evolved to resemble plants or rocks so they can blend into the background and avoid being attacked. But a viper from Iran has found an even stranger strategy. The tip of this snake's tail looks like a spider, complete with a bulbous body and long dangling legs. And when a bird swoops in to try to eat this "spider," the snake springs into action and eats the bird.
A spider-tailed horned viper. Credit: Omid Mozaffari.
The elusive spider-tailed horned viper is a relatively recently discovered species, and until now, scientists only knew what the outside of this snake's unusual tail looked like. But in a new study published in the journal The Anatomical Record, researchers used XCT scanners to get a glimpse of the inner workings of this snake's spidery tail—and found that its tail bones are bizarrely normal.
Scientists first collected a specimen of this snake in 1968, and when they brought it back to the Field Museum, people thought that it had some sort of deformity at the tip of its tail, like a tumour. It sat on the shelves of the museum for decades, but it wasn't until another specimen with a similar tail was found in 2003 that people revisited it.
In 2006, scientists described the snake as a new species, Pseudocerastes urarachnoides, the spider-tailed horned viper. When the researchers described the species, they used the specimen in the Field Museum's collections as the holotype, the specimen that serves as a standard-bearer for the physical characteristics of the species.
Soon after, researchers captured a video of the snake using the spider-like appendage at the tip of its tail to lure in birds and eat them.
Vertebral morphology and intracolumnar variation of the iconic and bizarre viperid snake Pseudocerastes urarachnoides (Serpentes, Viperidae), The Anatomical Record (2026). DOI: 10.1002/ar.70308
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