Bigger brains can be an advantage for prey animals, as it can help them outsmart their predators. But big brains may be too costly to maintain when predation risk is high, forcing animals to use other strategies to survive, suggests a study on frog camouflage published Wednesday (August 17) in Science Advances.
Prior research on various species including guppies has shown that animals with larger brains can better avoid predators, and the researchers behind the new work had previously shown that large-brained frogs live longer. But they also knew frogs deploy another successful anti-predation strategy: camouflage. Frogs can vary widely in how they look, from stunningly vibrant to nearly indistinguishable from their surroundings. The study authors were curious about the relationship between brain size and camouflage, and how predation pressure influenced both.
To find out, they hiked into in the Hengduan Mountains, a biodiverse range located in Southwestern China. At ...
