Self-decoration camouflage

Among animals, self-decoration is found in decorator crabs, some insects such as caddis flies and the masked hunter bug, and occasionally also in octopuses.

Cott compares the way Australian aborigines once used water lily leaves over their faces to swim towards waterfowl until they were close enough to catch them by the legs.

[5] Decorator crabs of many species camouflage themselves with pieces of seaweed, shells, small stones, and living organisms such as hydrozoa, sponges, and sea anemones to evade predators.

[10] The strategy has been used by traditional human hunters, such as when Australian aborigines dressed in emu skins and adopted emu-like postures to hunt these birds.

This is often provided by a ghillie suit, a whole-body covering fitted with many loops into which the wearer can insert grass or other plant materials to match the local environment, or are made with cloth simulating tufts of leaves.

[12] Cott used the example of the larva of the blotched emerald moth, which fixes a screen of fragments of leaves to its specially hooked bristles, to argue that military camouflage had used the same method, pointing out that the "device is ... essentially the same as one widely practised during the Great War for the concealment, not of caterpillars, but of caterpillar-tractors, [gun] battery positions, observation posts and so forth.