Adaptive Coloration in Animals has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Article milestones Date Process Result April 16, 2013 Good article nominee Listed
	A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the " Did you know?" column on November 23, 2012. The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that Adaptive Coloration in Animals was said to be the only zoology book ever to be packed in a soldier's kitbag?

This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Animals Low‑importance Adaptive Coloration in Animals is within the scope of WikiProject Animals, an attempt to better organize information in articles related to animals and zoology. For more information, visit the project page.AnimalsWikipedia:WikiProject AnimalsTemplate:WikiProject Animalsanimal articles Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale. WikiProject Animals To-do: history watch purge Here are some Open Tasks : Copyedit: Merge: GLAM/ARKive donated texts into articles about endangered species. Improve: Photoperiodism, Tool use by non-human animals, Omnivore, Animal suicide, Sphaerium beckmani (a species in family Sphaeriidae), Requests: Mammals: Invertebrates: Campocraspedon Fishes: Zaniolepis frenata Merge: GLAM/ARKive donated texts into articles about endangered species. Expand: Junqueira cow, Atka mackerel Nominate and vote: Science collaboration of the month, Article Improvement Drive, WikiProject Animals Collaboration Books This article is within the scope of WikiProject Books. To participate in the project, please visit its page, where you can join the project and discuss matters related to book articles. To use this banner, please refer to the documentation. To improve this article, please refer to the relevant guideline for the type of work.BooksWikipedia:WikiProject BooksTemplate:WikiProject BooksBook articles

This article is written in British English, which has its own spelling conventions (colour, travelled, centre, defence, artefact, analyse) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

Was the first edition published in the UK really spelled 'coloration' and not 'colouration'? And if so, why? Why would a British author publishing in the UK use American spelling, especially back in 1940 when US spelling was not used at all in the UK, (unlike today)? 86.134.91.122 ( talk) 07:41, 23 November 2012 (UTC) reply

In Poulton's time in 1890, we Brits wrote "colouration", but by 1940 that looked strange to us and we generally wrote "coloration", which we still do today. In the book itself, both Huxley (in the Preface) and Cott (in the text) write "colour" but "coloration". Sorry but that's how it is... Chiswick Chap ( talk) 07:55, 23 November 2012 (UTC) reply

If it's any consolation, the American authors Abbott Handerson Thayer and Gerald H. Thayer published Concealing Colouration in the Animal Kingdom (New York, 1909), so perhaps the Brit/Am spelling split isn't quite as clear as you imagined. Chiswick Chap ( talk) 10:16, 23 November 2012 (UTC) reply

This review is transcluded from Talk:Adaptive Coloration in Animals/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Cwmhiraeth ( talk · contribs) 09:41, 12 April 2013 (UTC) reply

• I propose to take on this review and will be going through the article in detail shortly. Cwmhiraeth ( talk) 09:41, 12 April 2013 (UTC) reply

First reading

• I will look properly at the lead section after I have studied the rest of the text.

• There is a need for consistency as to whether American or British English is used in the article. It is a pity that a British Author publishing his book in the UK chose to call it Adaptive Coloration in Animals.

I believe I've used Brit throughout; coloration was and remains an acceptable Brit spelling, and since it's in the British title we have no choice in the matter. He always uses "coloration" but "colour". We also say "humour" but "humorous", etc etc.

• The first sentence in "Approach" is too long and should be broken up.

done

• "The book addresses its subject under three main headings: concealment, advertising, and disguise." - "advertisement" would be better here.

done (x2)

• "Caterpillars and pupae (as in Poulton) are coloured to match their environment." - What does "as in Poulton" mean?

changed to ... Poulton's experiment, with link

• I think you might explain "obliterative shading" a little.

have added "i.e." before the explanation, it's a name for Countershading, and explained a little.

• Do you think it is a good thing having all these bold examples in upper case? Having had "The methods by which concealment is attained in nature", you follow it with "General Colour Resemblance". It seems illogical to me and seems to conflict with { http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Quotations MOS typographical conformity).

Mmm, yes, I've put all the chapter headings in "Sentence case", and mark them all "Chapter" to make it clear they're Cott's headings.

• "... teh form of the animals wearing them." - Was this misprint in the original or is the typo introduced by you?

just a typo, thanks.

• "Cott considers how adaptive camouflage is, such as in incubation and rest (sleep) in birds." This sentence structure seems a little awkward.

changed to "how effective camouflage is as an adaptation..."

• "Cott describes how predators approach prey, taking care to reduce visible movement, and of scent." - Ditto

changed to "the care that predators take..."

• "In this chapter Cott takes various objections to the adaptive (evolutionary) nature of camouflage," - "discusses" or some similar word might be better.

done

• "... and diurnal to make themselves visible." - I don't know what Cott says, but I would have thought the animals in question can emerge and feed in the daytime because of their colouration not in order to make themselves visible.

Changed to "diurnal, since warning displays only work if they can be seen." p. 203

• "Some birds nest near wasps." - You might expand this - you presumably mean wasp nests.

done

• It would be better to mention and link "aposematism" in the text rather than the heading.

done

• "Experimental evidence is presented that conspicuous insects are rejected by predators." - Are all conspicuous insects rejected or just ones with warning colours?

the latter of course, thanks.

• "Huxley quoted the now long-forgotten Aaron Franklin Shull's 1936 Evolution[13] who opined "These special forms ..." - I think you could omit the "who opined" or replace it with "which stated" or somesuch.

done

• I tried to find instructions in the MOS guidelines about what punctuation mark if any is correct before a quotation. Sometimes you use a colon but mostly you don't use anything.

Heaven forfend anyone writes any more MOS guidelines. I've removed the colons except where a structure like "... as follows:" or a natural break in the sentence seems to demand one. Guess I've always used that rule unconsciously.

• That's all for now. Cwmhiraeth ( talk) 10:57, 13 April 2013 (UTC) reply

Ok, done those... Chiswick Chap ( talk) 18:35, 15 April 2013 (UTC) reply

GA Criteria

• 1a The article is well written and the prose is of a high quality.
• 1b The article conforms with the MOS guidelines. Some suggestions to help compliance as mentioned above have been actioned.
• 2a&b The article is well referenced and has inline citations for all contentious statements.
• 2c There is no original research as far as I can see.
• 3a&b The coverage is broad enough and the article does not include irrelevant material.
• 4 The article is neutral.
• 5 The article was created by the nominator in November 2012 and has hardly been edited by anybody else.
• 6 The images are mostly subject to copyright but are used at low resolution in the article for the purpose of illustrating the points made in the book and their non-free use rationales are satisfactorily given.
• 7 The images are relevant to the topic and have suitable captions.
• Overall assessment - Pass.

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Adaptive Coloration in Animals. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120731055420/http://camouflage.osu.edu:80/cott.html to http://camouflage.osu.edu/cott.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{ Sourcecheck}}).

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{ source check}} (last update: 18 January 2022).

• If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
• If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 02:51, 4 October 2016 (UTC) reply