What happens to some cephalopods when they swim over a gravel patch on the seafloor?

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问题
What happens to some cephalopods when they swim over a gravel patch on the seafloor?
Listen to part of a lecture in a biology class.
Professor: In the animal kingdom, camouflage is a common strategy to avoid predation. There are many examples. The most famous might be the chameleon, a lizard that can change its skin color to match its surroundings, but there are also insects that look like leaves or flowers, frogs that look like rocks. I’m sure you could think of a dozen more examples. First of all, let me introduce a technical term that’s often used for camouflage, and that’s "crypsis."
    When we examine crypsis in the animal kingdom, it may appear that there are a thousand different patterns animals use to hide from predators. However, recent research involving cephalopods is teaching us there is actually less there that meets the eye.
    Squid, octopus, and cuttlefish are cephalopods, and they are uniquely suited for crypsis research because individual animals don’t have a fixed coloration. They actually can very quickly change the appearance of their skin to match almost any habitat. Cephalopods can produce up to 50 different colors, patterns and textures, but what the research is showing is that all these patterns employed by the cephalopods are variations on just three basic types of crypsis.
    The first is uniform or stipple. The word "stipple" is taken from visual arts. It means making small dots to create the impression of a solid color. Anyway, uniform or stipple body patterns are used by cephalopods to match their skin color to fairly uniform backgrounds like the sandy sea bottom. A sandy sea bottom has one basic color with little variation, so an octopus would only need to change its skin color to one basic color to match the environment.
    When a cephalopod needs to blend into a non-uniform, a more varied background, like gravel, which is made up of small rocks of various sizes and colors, the cephalopods choose a mottled body pattern. Mottled body patterns consist of alternating, irregularly shaped dark and light patches in the skin that roughly match the size of the dark and light objects in the immediate area.
    And finally, cephalopods also use what’s called "disruptive coloration." Disruptive body patterns are irregular patches of different shapes and colors that serve to distract an observer’s attention and obscure the outline or true shape of the animal. In other words, a disrupted pattern makes it difficult the shape and size of the animal. Disruptive patterns can also achieve some level of general resemblance to the background. That is, they often contain small regions with mottled patterns or even uniformity. Cephalopods will adopt this crypsis strategy when the background is irregular and contains relatively large and irregular patches of colors and textures.
    You may be asking yourselves why studying cephalopod crypsis is important. Well, while evolution has produced a wide variety of body colorations and patterns in the animal kingdom, the basic pattern types we’ve observed in cephalopods are used throughout the animal kingdom and ecological habitats, and that goes not just for animals that can change their cryptic pattern, but also for animals that have just one cryptic pattern they cannot change. You could also come to the conclusion that these are same basic strategies used by the chameleons, frogs and insects we talked about, and by larger animals as well. For example, the tiger’s pattern of black strips on a lighter background is a form of disruptive coloration.

选项 A、They display a disruptive coloration to match the local environment.
B、They quickly swim away from the gravel patch.
C、They change their skin color to match the color of the darkest pieces of gravel.
D、They display irregularly shaped dark and light patches.

答案D

解析 细节题。线索词为like,教授在讲授第二种叫做mottled body pattern的隐蔽方法时,举例说明模仿由各种大小、颜色石块构成的碎石堆的图案即属于该方法:When a cephalopod needs to blend into a non-Uniform,a more varied background,like gravel,which is made up of small rocks of various sizes and colors,the cephalopods choose a mottled body pattern.并具体解释了原理,即通过深浅板块的交替呈现来与周围环境匹配一致,因此D选项是正确答案。在对混隐色的描述中未提到模仿碎石堆的图案,因此A选项不正确。教授未提到头足类动物快速逃离碎石堆,因此B选项不正确。动物不仅只模仿深色部分,同时也模仿浅色部分。因此C选项不正确。
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