PawSteps · How animals survive
Most animals can't outrun what's chasing them. So a great many have gone the other way instead: become a shape that isn't worth eating, or a thing that isn't food at all. Some of the best examples are on your doorstep.
The commonest trick of all: stop being an animal-shaped thing, and become an object.
Our own version, and the one you're most likely to meet. A band of muscle round the edge of the spiny skin pulls tight like a drawstring bag, and the head, legs and soft belly disappear inside. What's left is a sphere with roughly five to seven thousand spines pointing outwards.
It works so well that hedgehogs have very few natural enemies. It also means they don't run — which is exactly why a strimmer or a car is so lethal to them. The defence that works against a fox does nothing against a lawnmower.
A walking pinecone, covered in overlapping scales made of keratin — the same stuff as your fingernails and a hedgehog's spines. Threatened, it rolls into a ball so tight a lion can chew at it without getting anywhere.
Sadly, the same behaviour makes them trivially easy for a person to pick up and carry off, which is a large part of why they are among the most trafficked wild mammals in the world.
A tiny toad from the flat-topped mountains of Venezuela. Cornered by a tarantula, it doesn't hop — it tucks its arms and legs under itself, goes completely rigid, and becomes a pebble. Then it lets go and bounces down the rock face.
It's light enough that the fall doesn't hurt it, and by the time it stops bouncing it's a long way from the spider.
Camouflage is hiding. This is better than hiding: being looked at directly and dismissed.
Several unrelated spiders have arrived at the same solution. They sit still on a leaf, patterned in chalky white and dark brown, looking precisely like a fresh bird dropping. A predator looks straight at it and moves on.
Some caterpillars do it too. It's a strategy that relies on being unappetising rather than invisible.
A flat shark that lies on the seabed covered in fringes and tassels, looking like a mossy carpet. Fish swim over what they take to be the floor, and the floor eats them.
The name comes from an Australian Aboriginal language and is usually translated as something like "shaggy beard", though you'll see the exact origin given differently in different places.
You don't need Venezuela for this. The buff-tip moth is a perfect broken birch twig, right down to the pale sheared-off end. The brimstone butterfly, closed up, is a leaf complete with veins. Peppered moths match bark so well that they became the most famous example of evolution in a school textbook. All three are findable on an ordinary walk.
Not a shrimp and not a mantis. The "smasher" kinds have two spring-loaded clubs they use to shatter crab and snail shells — they've been known to crack aquarium glass.
Worth getting right: you'll constantly read that the punch travels at the speed of a bullet. It doesn't. What's bullet-like is the acceleration — it goes from nothing to full speed astonishingly fast, which is a different and arguably more impressive claim. The strike is also fast enough to boil a tiny bubble of water beside it, so the prey gets hit twice.
Not all of them punch, either. Other mantis shrimps are "spearers", with barbed limbs for stabbing soft prey instead.
A large lizard from the Solomon Islands that lives in the canopy and uses its tail as a fifth limb, wrapping it round a branch to hang on while it reaches for leaves. Unusually for a lizard, it's a vegetarian, and it gives birth to live young rather than laying eggs.
That matters when we're around them, because we tend to read a still animal as a calm one. Very often it's the opposite: stillness is the emergency response. Research on hedgehogs taken into care has found raised stress hormones in animals that look completely relaxed, because a frightened hedgehog's whole strategy is to stop moving and wait for the danger to leave.
So an animal that isn't reacting isn't necessarily an animal that's fine. It might be an animal doing the only thing it knows how to do.