--- title: Masters of camouflage — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Masters of camouflage», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: 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 i --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / Masters of camouflage # 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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/8/) — An octopus, a cousin of the cuttlefish, normally has eight arms and can change colour and blend into rocks and walls too. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/11/) — Many moths rest still on trees looking like bark, and when factory soot darkened trees, dark moths survived better than pale ones. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/14/) — The frogfish looks like a sponge or rock, waits for fish and swallows them quickly, even fish as big as itself. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/189-masters-of-camouflage/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 poisonous](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/188-record-breakers-the-most-venomous-and-poisonous/) - next →: [Strange discoveries: living fossils, hidden apes and animals found in drawers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/190-strange-discoveries-living-fossils-hidden-apes-and-animals-found-in-drawers/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)