Response to 'Holes in the camouflage'

摘要

In his Correspondence article, Dr Packard questions our approach to studying cuttlefish camouflage body patterning (Chiao et al., 2010). While we respect Packard's invaluable contribution to the study of cephalopod chromatophores and freely acknowledge that he has inspired us to continue to investigate them, it seems to us that his criticism of our paper misses the point. His major concern was that cuttlefish did not match the brightness of the artificial substrates in most of our experiments, but our experiments were specifically concerned with pattern and contrast, not brightness. The reason for using these carefully designed substrates was not to test all aspects of ‘background matching’ but rather to apply psychophysical methods to examine systematically the visual features of the background that elicit the pattern design in Mottle camouflage, a particular type of body pattern whose function falls within the scope of general resemblance to the background [or what Stevens and Merilaita term ‘background matching’ (Stevens and Merilaita, 2009)].