Camouflaged Toads Optical Illusion

National Geographic is proud owner of some of the best photos in the world. Here and then a photo jumps out, containing an interesting effect which sometimes can be seen as optical illusion. Just check out this National Geographic tag, and you’ll be amazed how many illusions on this site are from NG. Anyway, today’s optical illusion was submitted by Urban Ambrozic and GrĂ©gory Plantard. We get many of “camouflage” illusions, but most of them don’t make it to the front page of Moillusions. This one however, took my attention. First I only saw one campuflaged toad – thought : “hm, its ok”, but after few moments I was able to spot the second and third one! How many of them are there?! Those three leaf-litter toads were collected within yards of each other, and its amazing how they almost disappear on a forest floor in Panama. For them to stay alive in the tropics (where nearly everything is food for something else), often calls for such trickery to fool a predator’s eye. Below the photo, you may see a gallery of few similar photos (by NG as well). Can you spot an insect hiding in each of them? Those little animals could very well put Liu Bolin and Emma Hack to a shame. Amazing!

How many toads can you see in this photograph?
How many toads can you see in this photograph?

Check out National Geographic’s gallery with more camouflaged insects:

43 Replies to “Camouflaged Toads Optical Illusion”

  1. allot of the time i just go to the photo and try to work out the illusion without reading your post this being no exception, i didnt get it till i did read the post (how rude ;-) ) nature is good! nice one i like it!

  2. I read the article in which most of these photos were shown in the Dutch version of the National Geographic Magazine. I think my favorite one is the photo of the two insects that look like leafs. They even have brown spots, edges that look like there has been eaten a little bit of them and little branches as legs.

  3. I see 3…not sure where the fourth is…and the center one i thought was a actual leaf for like..2 minutes

  4. They’re pretty easy to see, but it’s still really cool that nature could produce something like that

  5. normally i don’t leave comments on anything. however, of all the optical illisions i’ve seen, this one has been the most dissappointing. i spotted the three frogs right away including the moth.

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