A NATURAL optical illusion is hiding two spiders but one is much harder to spot than the other.
The photo below shows two masked crab spiders hiding in a bunch of flowers.
Masked crabs are native to rainforests in China and have worked out a clever way to hide from predators.
Two researchers, Shi-Mao Wu and Jiang-Yun Gao, from the Yunnan University have since published a study on the behavior.
They noticed that males and females from the spider species team up to turn themselves into a flower.
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It's noted that this could be the first observed example of cooperative camouflage in the wild.
In the image, both spiders can be seen on top of each other.
It's easy to spot the male first but then the paler female is much harder to find.
"In a tropical rainforest in Xishuangbanna (Yunnan, China), we observed one male and one female crab spider (Thomisus guangxicus; Thomisidae) in an apparent partnership, to jointly mimic a single Hoya pandurata (Asclepiadaceae) flower.
"In this image, where the male crab spider lies on the back of the conspecific female, the male appears to mimic a flower's pistils and stamens while the female appears to mimic that same flower's fused corolla," the researchers wrote.
The male is much darker and smaller than the female so looks more like the middle of a flower.
That allows the female to blend in even more and appear as the petals of a pale flower.
"The flower's complex color is matched as a whole only when individual spiders of both sexes are present.
"This could be an example of “cooperation” that expands the niche of both females and males in mimicry systems, and cooperating individuals may have improved survivorship and predation efficiency," the researchers added.
Both experts would like to investigate this strange spide relationship further.
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"It would also be interesting to investigate the co-evolution between male and female crab spiders," they wrote.
