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Movement can expose camouflaged prey, yet whether colour patterns help moving prey to avoid capture is a long-standing puzzle. Butterfly wings might offer an answer.
By
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Gopal Murali
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Gopal Murali is at the Center for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru 560012, India.
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“The importance of stillness as an aid to concealment can hardly be overestimated,” wrote zoologist Hugh Cott1. Yet prey cannot always remain still. Movement is among the most powerful cues that animals use to detect and track objects, creating a fundamental problem: even the best camouflage can fail once an animal moves2. Certain high-contrast patterns in prey, such as a zebra’s stripes, have long been proposed1,3 as an alternative defensive strategy during motion, but gaining supporting evidence has proved surprisingly difficult4. Writing in Nature, Hancock et al.5 put this century-old idea to a new test in butterflies.
Nature 658, 879-880 (2026)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-03062-7
References
Cott, H. B. Adaptive Coloration in Animals (Methuen, 1940).
Ioannou, C. C. & Krause, J. Biol. Lett. 5, 191–193 (2009).
Thayer, G. H. Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (Macmillan, 1909).
Scott-Samuel, N. E., Caro, T., Matchette, S. R. & Cuthill, I. C. Biol. J. Linn. Soc. 140, 485–503 (2023).
Hancock, G. R. A., Briolat, E. S., Hughes, A. E., Kelley, L. A. & Troscianko, J. Nature 658, 958–962 (2026).
Behrens, R. R. Leonardo 32, 53–59 (1999).
Kodandaramaiah, U., Palathingal, S., Bindu Kurup, G. & Murali, G. Behav. Ecol. 31, 43–53 (2020).
Puissant, A., Chotard, A., Condamine, F. L., Debat, V. & Llaurens, V. Ecol. Lett. 29, e70303 (2026).
Tan, M., Zhang, S., Stevens, M., Li, D. & Tan, E. J. Biol. Rev. 99, 778–796 (2024).
Competing Interests
The author declares no competing interests.
Read the paper: Butterfly wing patterns in flight create powerful illusory motion cues
An evolutionary route to warning coloration
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