Coincident disruptive coloration
Coincident disruptive coloration or coincident disruptive patterns are patterns of disruptive coloration in animals that go beyond the usual camouflage function of breaking up the continuity of an animal's shape, to join up parts of the body that are separate. This is seen in extreme form in frogs such as Afrixalus fornasini where the camouflage pattern extends across the body, head, and all four limbs, making the animal look quite unlike a frog when at rest with the limbs tucked in.
A special case is the disruptive eye mask that camouflages the most conspicuous feature of many animals, the eye.
Experimental test[edit]
The effect was tested in two experiments in 2009 by Innes Cuthill and Aron Székely. The first experiment presented wild insect-eating birds with edible pastry targets resembling moths, with or without coincident disruptive patterns. The second experiment showed similar targets to humans on computer screens. They found in both experiments that coincident disruption was "an effective mechanism for concealing an otherwise revealing body form".[8][9]