Two spiders hiding in photo of flowers using ‘first of its kind’ camouflage illusion – and the second is harder to spot
A NATURAL optical illusion is hiding two spiders but one is much harder to spot than the other.
The photo below shows two masked crab spiders hiding in a bunch of flowers.
Masked crabs are native to rainforests in China and have worked out a clever way to hide from predators.
Two researchers, Shi-Mao Wu and Jiang-Yun Gao, from the Yunnan University have since published a study on the behavior.
They noticed that males and females from the spider species team up to turn themselves into a flower.
It’s noted that this could be the first observed example of cooperative camouflage in the wild.
In the image, both spiders can be seen on top of each other.
It’s easy to spot the male first but then the paler female is much harder to find.
“In a tropical rainforest in Xishuangbanna (Yunnan, China), we observed one male and one female crab spider (Thomisus guangxicus; Thomisidae) in an apparent partnership, to jointly mimic a single Hoya pandurata (Asclepiadaceae) flower.
“In this image, where the male crab spider lies on the back of the conspecific female, the male appears to mimic a flower’s pistils and stamens while the female appears to mimic that same flower’s fused corolla,” the researchers wrote.
The male is much darker and smaller than the female so looks more like the middle of a flower.
That allows the female to blend in even more and appear as the petals of a pale flower.
“The flower’s complex color is matched as a whole only when individual spiders of both sexes are present.
“This could be an example of “cooperation” that expands the niche of both females and males in mimicry systems, and cooperating individuals may have improved survivorship and predation efficiency,” the researchers added.
Both experts would like to investigate this strange spide relationship further.
“It would also be interesting to investigate the co-evolution between male and female crab spiders,” they wrote.
The science behind optical illusions
This brief explanation may help to unscramble your brain...
- Optical illusions make a little bit more sense when you learn that our eyes have very little to do with what we see and it is our brains that play the key role in creating images and trying to protect us from the potential threats around us
- Our brain is constantly trying to make sense of the world at the quickest pace it can despite the world being in 3D and the images on our retinas being in 2D
- It can be really difficult for your brain to interpret everything at once so it will often take shortcuts and give you a simplified version of what you see so you can have quicker reaction times if the object you’re looking at looks dangerous
- When you look at an object what you’re really seeing is the light that bounced off of it and entered your eye, which is converted into electrical impulses that your brain then turns into an image
- Our brains can warp straight lines if an object in the middle of them looks like it’s drawing closer as it wants to emphasize the potential threat
- Different colours and light and dark can make the same sized objects look different or make patterned images look like they’re spinning