Dr Halfwerk will use this funding to support the CAMOSENSE project, in which researchers are attempting to understand how an ecological community uses camouflage and what happens when the environment changes.
Evolutionary arms race
Predators and prey are an integral part of a wider community, so the ways in which they interact with one another will often have a major impact on their entire ecosystem. Many of these interactions are characterized by an evolutionary arms race in which the prey evolve characteristics that help them to escape their predators who then adapt to become more efficient at finding and catching their prey.
Camouflage as a weapon
Camouflage plays a key part in this arms race, with prey animals in particular using it to conceal themselves. However, the effectiveness of camouflage is highly dependant on the predator’s sensory abilities and on external characteristics that enable the prey to blend into its surroundings, as it were. The CAMOSENSE project’s researchers are focusing on moths, which have to conceal themselves from birds during the day and avoid bats at night.
Moths that absorb sound waves
Wouter Halfwerk explains that “In the lab, our research team recently showed that many moths are covered in hairs that can absorb ultrasonic sound waves. This stealth layer renders them ‘invisible’ to a bat’s echo-location system. In the Vidi project, we plan to explore the visual and acoustic characteristics of a large number of species. We want to identify the conditions under which they are likely to encounter certain predators, and the extent to which they are protected by camouflage.”
Setting up a database
These camouflage characteristics will be partly modelled and partly tested in behavioural experiments involving bats and songbirds. Ultimately, the researchers want to create a database of camouflage properties per species and per type of environment. “This database will enable researchers to predict how ecological communities might transform in response to climate change and urbanization. They can also use it to predict insect infestations and the impact on biodiversity” says Dr Halfwerk.