Predatory animals have a problem: their food does not want to be eaten and does its utmost to avoid being captured.

Many animals hide themselves, often by becoming camouflaged. Many insects use such a strategy effectively: there are insects that rest on bark and become indistinguishable from it while others rest on rocks and look just like rocks.

Camouflage can also be dynamic. An animal like the chameleon can change its colour to make it blend better with its surroundings and, like many camouflaged animals, it spends a lot of time immobile or moves slowly so as not to give itself away.

Some insects hide themselves by resembling something inedible such as a bird dropping, while the caterpillars of many species of geometrid moths bear an uncanny resemblance to sticks and twigs. The behaviour of these caterpillars complements their appearance. They can remain motionless for hours even when prodded.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are animals that actually advertise their presence, more often than not by being brightly coloured, usually in combinations of red, yellow and black.

Brightly-coloured insects such as the ladybird have a bad taste, others such as wasps have a painful sting. The bad taste in insects can arise in at least two ways: they can either produce the foul-tasting chemical themselves or they can store poisons from the plants they eat in their bodies.

Some insects hide themselves by resembling something inedible such as a bird dropping

Some brightly-coloured insects are cheats: they are perfectly edible but they mimic other poisonous insects so that predators give them a miss.

Hoverflies not only resemble bees and wasps but often imitate them. They hover in front of flowers and even buzz like the species they are imitating.

Some insects ‘play possum’, a defence mechanism used by many species of invertebrates and vertebrates that sees them pretend to be dead, as many predators can detect and capture only living prey.

Other insects use the element of surprise to escape being captured. These are often well-camouflaged creatures which remain immobile until a predator approaches them very closely. At the very last moment, they uncover unusual markings such as eyespots or bright colours that startle the predator long enough for them to escape.

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