Camouflage is the
use of any combination of materials, coloration, or illumination for
concealment, either by making animals or objects hard to see (crypsis), or by disguising
them as something else (mimesis). Examples include the leopard's spotted coat,
the battledress of a modern soldier, and the leaf-mimic katydid's wings. A
third approach, motion dazzle, confuses the observer with a conspicuous
pattern, making the object visible but momentarily harder to locate. The
majority of camouflage methods aim for crypsis, often through a general
resemblance to the background, high contrast disruptive coloration, eliminating
shadow, and countershading. In the open ocean, where there is no background,
the principal methods of camouflage are transparency, silvering, and
countershading, while the ability to produce light is among other things used
for counter-illumination on the undersides of cephalopods such as squid. Some animals,
such as chameleons and octopuses, are capable of actively changing their skin
pattern and colours, whether for camouflage or for signalling.
Military
camouflage was spurred by the increasing range and accuracy of firearms in the
19th century. In particular the replacement of the inaccurate musket with the
rifle made personal concealment in battle a survival skill. In the 20th
century, military camouflage developed rapidly, especially during the First
World War. On land, artists such as André Mare designed camouflage schemes and
observation posts disguised as trees. At sea, merchant ships and troop carriers
were painted in dazzle patterns that were highly visible, but designed to
confuse enemy submarines as to the target's speed, range, and heading. During
and after the Second World War, a variety of camouflage schemes were used for
aircraft and for ground vehicles in different theatres of war. The use of radar
since the mid-20th century has largely made camouflage for fixed-wing military
aircraft obsolete.
Non-military use
of camouflage includes making cell telephone towers less obtrusive and helping
hunters to approach wary game animals. Patterns derived from military
camouflage are frequently used in fashion clothing, exploiting their strong
designs and sometimes their symbolism. Camouflage themes recur in modern art,
and both figuratively and literally in science fiction and works of literature.
In Zoology
Camouflage is the
use of any combination of materials, coloration, or illumination for
concealment, either by making animals or objects hard to see (crypsis), or by
disguising them as something else (mimesis). Examples include the leopard's
spotted coat, the battledress of a modern soldier, and the leaf-mimic katydid's
wings. A third approach, motion dazzle, confuses the observer with a
conspicuous pattern, making the object visible but momentarily harder to
locate. The majority of camouflage methods aim for crypsis, often through a
general resemblance to the background, high contrast disruptive coloration,
eliminating shadow, and countershading. In the open ocean, where there is no
background, the principal methods of camouflage are transparency, silvering,
and countershading, while the ability to produce light is among other things
used for counter-illumination on the undersides of cephalopods such as squid.
Some animals, such as chameleons and octopuses, are capable of actively
changing their skin pattern and colours, whether for camouflage or for
signalling.
The English
zoologist Edward Bagnall Poulton studied animal coloration, especially
camouflage. In his 1890 book The Colours of Animals, he classified different
types such as "special protective resemblance" (where an animal looks
like another object), or "general aggressive resemblance" (where a
predator blends in with the background, enabling it to approach prey). His
experiments showed that swallowtailed moth pupae were camouflaged to match the
backgrounds on which they were reared as larvae. Poulton's "general
protective resemblance" was at that time considered to be the main method
of camouflage, as when Frank Evers Beddard wrote in 1892 that
"tree-frequenting animals are often green in colour. Among vertebrates
numerous species of parrots, iguanas, tree-frogs, and the green tree-snake are
examples". Beddard did however briefly mention other methods, including
the "alluring coloration" of the flower mantis and the possibility of
a different mechanism in the orange tip butterfly. He wrote that "the
scattered green spots upon the under surface of the wings might have been
intended for a rough sketch of the small flowerets of the plant [an
umbellifer], so close is their mutual resemblance." He also explained the
coloration of sea fish such as the mackerel: "Among pelagic fish it is
common to find the upper surface dark-coloured and the lower surface white, so
that the animal is inconspicuous when seen either from above or below."
The artist Abbott
Handerson Thayer formulated what is sometimes called Thayer's Law, the principle
of countershading. However, he overstated the case in the 1909 book
Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, arguing that "All patterns
and colors whatsoever of all animals that ever preyed or are preyed on are
under certain normal circumstances obliterative" (that is, cryptic
camouflage), and that "Not one 'mimicry' mark, not one 'warning color'...
nor any 'sexually selected' color, exists anywhere in the world where there is
not every reason to believe it the very best conceivable device for the
concealment of its wearer", and using paintings such as Peacock in the
Woods (1907) to reinforce his argument. Thayer was roundly mocked for these
views by critics including Teddy Roosevelt.
The English
zoologist Hugh Cott's 1940 book Adaptive Coloration in Animals corrected
Thayer's errors, sometimes sharply: "Thus we find Thayer straining the
theory to a fantastic extreme in an endeavour to make it cover almost every
type of coloration in the animal kingdom." Cott built on Thayer's
discoveries, developing a comprehensive view of camouflage based on
"maximum disruptive contrast", countershading and hundreds of examples.
The book explained how disruptive camouflage worked, using streaks of boldly
contrasting colour, paradoxically making objects less visible by breaking up
their outlines. While Cott was more systematic and balanced in his view than
Thayer, and did include some experimental evidence on the effectiveness of
camouflage, his 500-page textbook was, like Thayer's, mainly a natural history
narrative which illustrated theories with examples.
Camouflage is a
soft-tissue feature that is rarely preserved in the fossil record, but rare
fossilised skin samples from the Cretaceous period show that some marine
reptiles were countershaded. The skins, pigmented with dark-coloured eumelanin,
reveal that both leatherback turtles and mosasaurs had dark backs and light
bellies
Self-decoration
Some animals
actively seek to hide by decorating themselves with materials such as twigs,
sand, or pieces of shell from their environment, to break up their outlines, to
conceal the features of their bodies, and to match their backgrounds. For
example, a caddis fly larva builds a decorated case and lives almost entirely
inside it; a decorator crab covers its back with seaweed, sponges and stones.
The nymph of the predatory masked bug uses its hind legs and a 'tarsal fan' to
decorate its body with sand or dust. There are two layers of bristles
(trichomes) over the body. On these, the nymph spreads an inner layer of fine
particles and an outer layer of coarser particles. The camouflage may conceal
the bug from both predators and prey.
Similar
principles can be applied for military purposes, for instance when a sniper
wears a ghillie suit designed to be further camouflaged by decoration with
materials such as tufts of grass from the sniper's immediate environment. Such
suits were used as early as 1916, the British army having adopted "coats
of motley hue and stripes of paint" for snipers. Cott takes the example of
the larva of the blotched emerald moth, which fixes a screen of fragments of
leaves to its specially hooked bristles, to argue that military camouflage uses
the same method, pointing out that the "device is ... essentially the same
as one widely practised during the Great War for the concealment, not of
caterpillars, but of caterpillar-tractors, [gun] battery positions, observation
posts and so forth."
Fashion, art and society
Military
camouflage patterns influenced fashion and art from the time of the First World
War onwards. Gertrude Stein recalled the cubist artist Pablo Picasso's reaction
in around 1915:
I very well
remember at the beginning of the war being with Picasso on the boulevard
Raspail when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at night, we had heard
of camouflage but we had not seen it and Picasso amazed looked at it and then
cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is cubism.
— Gertrude Stein
in From Picasso (1938)—
In 1919, the
attendants of a "dazzle ball", hosted by the Chelsea Arts Club, wore
dazzle-patterned black and white clothing. The ball influenced fashion and art
via postcards and magazine articles. The Illustrated London News announced:
The scheme of
decoration for the great fancy dress ball given by the Chelsea Arts Club at the
Albert Hall, the other day, was based on the principles of "Dazzle",
the method of "camouflage" used during the war in the painting of
ships ... The total effect was brilliant and fantastic.
More recently,
fashion designers have often used camouflage fabric for its striking designs,
its "patterned disorder" and its symbolism. Camouflage clothing can
be worn largely for its symbolic significance rather than for fashion, as when,
during the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, anti-war protestors
often ironically wore military clothing during demonstrations against the
American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Modern artists
such as Ian Hamilton Finlay have used camouflage to reflect on war. His 1973
screenprint of a tank camouflaged in a leaf pattern, Arcadia, is described by
the Tate as drawing "an ironic parallel between this idea of a natural
paradise and the camouflage patterns on a tank". The title refers to the
Utopian Arcadia of poetry and art, and the memento mori Latin phrase Et in
Arcadia ego which recurs in Hamilton Finlay's work. In science fiction,
Camouflage is a novel about shapeshifting alien beings by Joe Haldeman. The word
is used more figuratively in works of literature such as Thaisa Frank's
collection of stories of love and loss, A Brief History of Camouflage.
