Word: cott
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...writes Zoologist Hugh B. Cott of Cambridge University in the preface of his plentifully illustrated new book, Adaptive Coloration in Animals (Oxford; $8.50). When it appeared in Britain, Cott was at once snapped up by the British armed forces to make their guns as inconspicuous as woodcocks, their tanks as bush bucks, their planes as pickerel. Sternly scientific, the book is more readable than popular "wonder books" of nature...
...climaxes of obliterative coloring." Obliterative climax of the Thayers' theories-which made Theodore Roosevelt gnash his teeth and boom "Nature Fakers!"-was the idea that flamingos are concealingly colored because their foes mistake them for sunsets. Other biologists have been skeptical of all claimed adaptations, especially mimetic postures. Cott goes to neither extreme. Proof of adaptive coloration, he agrees, "is one of the most notable triumphs ever won by the great (Darwinian) Theory of Natural Selection." In Cott's book it is a triple triumph...
Concealment. That concealing coloration is not accident is in part proved, Cott says, by the astonishing variety of color-causes. Some caterpillars are green because their blood absorbs chlorophyll from their food; others because they are transparent, revealing the green food inside them. A South American sloth acquires a concealing greenish hue from symbiotic algae which live...
...Cott describes a number of statistical experiments in which assorted birds and insects have been exposed purposely to predators. Results show clearly that concealing colors and confusing patterns are of major importance in the survival of many species...
...PILGRIM HAWK-Glenway Wes-cott-Harper...