--- title: How animals hide: camouflage and mimicry — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «How animals hide: camouflage and mimicry», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Out in the wild, being seen can mean being eaten, and being seen by your dinner means going hungry, so many animals have become m --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/) [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/) / How animals hide: camouflage and mimicry # How animals hide: camouflage and mimicry Lesson 51 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 18 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/51-how-animals-hide/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/0/) — Out in the wild, being seen can mean being eaten, and being seen by your dinner means going hungry, so many animals have become masters of hide and seek. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/1/) — Camouflage means looking like the things around you: a stick insect looks like a twig, a polar bear looks like snow, a flounder looks like the sandy seabed, a tawny owl looks like bark. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/2/) — Mimicry is a different trick: a harmless animal copies a dangerous one, like the hoverfly dressed as a wasp, or copies something nobody wants to eat, like the caterpillar dressed as a bird dropping. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/3/) — Think of the class stick insect that nobody can find for five minutes: it is right there in the tank, but your eyes hunt for an insect shape and see only twigs. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/4/) — Cartoons show a chameleon turning tartan on a tartan blanket and vanishing; the real chameleon cannot copy patterns at all and changes colour mostly to show its mood and to warm up or cool down. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/5/) — A chameleon changes colour by moving tiny crystals in special skin cells, which changes how light bounces off its skin; it does this mostly to signal to other chameleons and to control its temperature. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/6/) — Stick insects are long, thin and brown or green, and they hold still or sway gently like a twig in the wind; one from China measured about 64 cm with its legs stretched out. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/7/) — The arctic fox grows a thick white coat for the snowy winter and a thinner brown-grey coat for summer, so it matches the ground in both seasons. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/8/) — A polar bear's hairs are see-through and hollow and its skin is black; the clear hairs scatter light, so the bear looks white against the ice; zoo polar bears have even turned a bit green when tiny algae grew inside their hollow hairs. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/9/) — A flounder lies flat on the seabed, flicks sand over its edges and changes its pattern to match; a baby flounder swims upright, then one eye moves over to the other side of its head. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/10/) — An octopus has thousands of colour cells and can raise bumps on its skin to copy rocks and weed in under a second, even though scientists think it cannot see colour the way we do. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/11/) — A hoverfly is a harmless fly with wasp-like yellow and black stripes; birds that have learned stripes mean a sting leave it alone, and this trick is called mimicry. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/12/) — A hoverfly has one pair of wings and can hover still in the air, while a wasp has two pairs. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/13/) — Every zebra has its own stripe pattern; scientists think the main job of stripes is to keep biting flies away, which they tested by putting striped and plain coats on horses and counting fly landings, and they may also confuse lions in a running herd. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/14/) — In smoky 1800s England, soot blackened tree trunks, so dark peppered moths hid better, birds ate the pale ones they could see, and dark moths became common; when the air got cleaner the pale ones came back. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/15/) — A tawny owl sleeps by day in streaky brown feathers that match bark; if small birds or crows find it, they mob it with loud alarm calls. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/16/) — Young swallowtail caterpillars look like shiny bird droppings, and older ones, too big to pass as a dropping, turn green with fake eye spots like a little snake. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/51-how-animals-hide/17/) — Leaf insects are flat and green with leaf veins and even brown spots like bite marks, and some rock gently like a leaf in the breeze. - ← previous: [How animals talk](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/50-how-animals-talk/) - next →: [How animals hunt](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/52-how-animals-hunt/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)