Why do some animals, like octopus and chameleons, have the ability to change color, and how do they achieve this?
In: Biology
Different animals have different things they are good at. For many animals, blending in with your environment can help you to escape predators trying to eat you. If you can change color to match your environment, then that is even better, but doing so is hard and requires extra brain power, which is expensive, so not a lot of animals can change color for camoflauge.
An octopus can change color because of special cells on their skin called chromatophores. The chromatophore is a kind of sack filled with a color containing compound. When the sack is stretched out, you see a big dot of color that probably blends into the adjacent sacks which are also stretched out, giving the appearance of a single color all over. When the sack is squished down tight, it appears as only a very tiny dot of color that is usually so small that you can’t even see it. You can think of it as being kind of like having a colored blanket that you can either stretch out into a big sheet to cover your whole body, or crumple up into a little ball that you can hide away. If you have a few different colors of chromatophore, you can mimic lots of different colors, just like your computer monitor only has red, green, and blue lights in it but can mimic all the colors of the rainbow.
Just because it comes up and you took a stab at it –
There are three acceptable English plurals for ‘octopus’ – Octopuses, Octopi, and Octopedes (Ahk-tah-poh-deez)
You should watch videos on cuttlefish hypnotizing their prey by a constant change of color. I think it’s really cool. Cuttlefish, and some other color changing animals, have special cells that contain pigment sacs; they are able to control when it is used
I’ve always been fascinated by whatever process is at work that can take what an octopus’ eyes sees, and then turn their skin into the matching color, texture, etc in real time. Amazing
The most important condition to blend into environment is to percive the environment.
Heve you ever wondered how Orange tiger hides in Green forest? Tiger percive green and orange as same colar and many animals which are tigers pray percive colors in same way.
Octopuses can actually see many colors ( more then human can)
Than goes fisibility. Mimicing is complex and energy heavy mechanism ( octopuses even have separate brain for it purposes) only weak and small animals which tend to be prey to very different hunters would benefit from such resource waste. For them it is not enough to hide from concrete predators, they need to hide from every in wast ocean.
Chameleons are also outcast. Relatively to their size they are patheticly weak and slow. They cannot outrun any danger, thus they need to hide.
Why so few animal evolved to activly mimic colors? Because hiding is the worst escape strategy. It is good for sleepovers though. But for mere sleepovers passive mimicing is sufficient enough.
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