Look Again: Secrets of Animal Camouflage. By Steve Jenkins and Robin
Page. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $17.99.
There is a constant arms race within the
animal kingdom, in which an adaptation that protects prey animals favors
predators that happen to be able to see through the adaptation – so they can
still catch prey. Then prey animals with a different adaptation become more
successful, until predators that happen to be able to see through that adaptation have a higher success
rate. And so it goes in the eternal food web – in which prey and predators
alike sometime use the same
adaptation. That is the case with camouflage, which – just as humans have
discovered in warfare – can be used both to stay concealed from enemies and to
make it difficult for potential victims to know that a predator is lurking.
Steve Jenkins and Robin Page explore both
sides of this prey-predator camouflage match in Look Again, and they do so with a cleverness made possible by their
very careful creation of illustrations consisting of collages made from cut and
torn paper, seen against digitally created backgrounds. In truth, photographs
of real animals in real settings would also show just how effective camouflage
can be for concealment or as a weapon, but by accentuating its workings through
their art, Jenkins and Page make their points about how camouflage functions
crystal-clear. They create their scenes so carefully that even after a young reader knows exactly where
to look, it can be hard to see the camouflaged creatures.
Jenkins and Page accomplish this by first
presenting scenes in which animals are shown against backgrounds that make them
almost invisible, and then – on the following pages – showing the animals in
identical positions but without the digital backgrounds. Thus, readers can look
at the size and shape of the animals, then turn back to the previous page and see,
or try to see, where the animals are. The whole book becomes a puzzle; and even
though matters are somewhat different in the real world – where, for example,
coral reefs and their denizens are in constant motion, not static as they must
be in a book’s pages – Look Again
does an excellent job of showing as well as explaining how various creatures’
appearances keep them safe or make them hard for their prey to spot.
The coral-reef environment is well-known
as a camouflage spot. Here, Jenkins and Page highlight such denizens as the
whip coral shrimp, which really looks like coral, and the trumpet fish, a long
and thin predator that hovers with mouth facing down so it looks like a
harmless frond. Even more interesting are the environments that are all around
the book’s readers but not usually thought of as camouflage “hot spots,”
including trees and their roots, flowers and plants, leaves and vines. The
creatures shown in these settings have some truly remarkable ways of blending
in: “The wings of the leaf-mimic katydid resemble decaying leaves, right down
to their veins and dark spots,” for example. And: “The tulip-tree beauty moth
almost disappears on a lichen-covered tree trunk.”
Jenkins and Page also explore places where
camouflage would seem to be difficult, if not impossible, including the vast
white expanse of the Arctic and locations that are mostly rocks. Here too they
find amazing adaptations, such as the wrybill, a wading bird that lays its eggs
on rocky riverbanks – with the eggs being the size and color of the rocks amid
which they lie.
Most creatures in Look Again will be unfamiliar to readers, and Jenkins and Page help
give a sense of them not only by their accurately created representations but
also by showing a human hand or adult human body next to each illustration, to
provide a sense of scale. The fact that animals of many sizes use camouflage as
a protective or hunting technique makes Look
Again all the more remarkable – for instance, both the two-inch-long
Namibian stone grasshopper and the five-foot-long marine iguana have ways of
remaining unseen in the very different rocky areas where they live.
At the back of the book, Jenkins and Page
provide four pages of additional information on every creature they have shown,
plus a list of books and Web sites where readers can get more information – and
even (a nice touch) a set of “useful Internet search terms” for those who would
like to explore further on their own. Jenkins and Page are experts at showing
young readers fascinating aspects of the world around us, and Look Again is another case in which they
have produced a book worth looking at again and again.
No comments:
Post a Comment