Could my creature's camouflage work?
I'm currently writing a short story about astronauts exploring a seemingly barren planet, which is covered in steep mountains with large flat areas in between. They soon find themselves hunted by the inhabitants who only come out at night. These aliens have pitch black skin that has the ability to create bright lights using chemical reactions similar to bioluminescent animals on earth. They use their unique ability to hide on top of the mountains and blend in with the starry background as they hunt their prey.
Would this ability be a useful camouflage system?
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1 answer
No, this would not work
The problem is the angle at which other creatures, such as your astronauts, are looking at the creature. The far closer lights from the predator would appear to change their position far too fast for stars that are very, very far away when moving around in the vicinity of the predator.
Theoretically the predator could fool one of the astronauts if the creature could estimate how stars would look like from the victims point of view, which is quite hard.
Imagine there are clouds in the sky. The creature would have to emulate these cloud movements from the victims point of view. Depending on how the clouds move, how the predator moves and how the victim moves this view would change.
Spotting your predator might be hard for a single astronaut if you are willing to give your predator an incredible amount of empathy to know how it should look like for the victim, but it will be easily spotted by two or more astronauts. The best tactic would be to keep some space between each other. Even with a few foot difference the predator should be easy to spot.
The problem about your idea of just placing a lot of stars on its body and looking like a patch of the sky is that this patch of the sky is behaving different from the rest and once your astronauts found out what is hunting them it will be easy to keep an eye out for unusual star constellations that they haven't seen before and that seem to be changing their position from the astronaut's point of view.
To get an idea of why this would not work try painting a few white/yellow dots on your thumb, which should otherwise be painted black, and hold it in front of you, between your face and your computer screen. Open up MS Paint or any other painting program and draw a black background with a few white/yellow dots. Now move your face around, but keep the thumb at the same position. Ignoring the fact that the colours are probably off, how does this look like?
This all gets worse when your creature actually attacks. It has to fly/jump down from the mountain tops and land on the victim, but if the victim knows that they have to keep an eye on the sky they will probably see the rapidly closer coming stars. And again, even if you can fool the one creature you are attacking the ones that are for example behind it or looking back will probably realize that there is a patch of stars rapidly moving - down the mountain...
As was mentioned in the comments this effect is also called Parallax:
Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines.
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