Shimmer and shine may help prey sabotage predators’ aim
Computer game for birds shows the confusing side of iridescent coloring

SHIMMER FOR SAFETY That lovely iridescence on a greenbottle fly and myriad other animals might offer a bit of protection from predators.
Charles R Berenguer Jr/iNaturalist.org (CC BY-NC)
A peck-the-bug computer game for quail shows that some of nature’s most spectacular coloring might be peacock obvious to the eye but tricky for a predator to grab.
In lab tests, it took birds almost four tries on average to nail an iridescent bug target (roughly inspired by the coloring of a greenbottle fly) as it moved across a gray screen, says Tom Pike of the University of Lincoln in England. The birds pecked similar targets without the shimmer in fewer than three tries on average. And the birds struck closer to the target center on the plain bug stand-ins than on the iridescent ones, Pike reports April 15 in Biology Letters.
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This unusual test bolsters the idea that flashy, changeable coloration mig

To test the idea that shimmering might sabotage predator aim, Pike simplified the challenge. Targets just looked like hemispheres gliding across a screen at about 150 millimeters per second. Whether real prey would prove as tricky to peck in the mosaic of backgrounds and lighting outdoors remains to be seen.