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.
Latest Answers