Books
James O’Hanlon
Liars, Cheats and Copycats
Nature, as scientist and PhD in animal behaviour James O’Hanlon knows, is the world’s greatest trickster. His latest book, Liars, Cheats and Copycats: Trickery and deception in nature, offers readers a compelling and in-depth exploration of the myriad ways in which animals and plants employ the arts of masquerade in order to manipulate their paths to survival, be it through self-disguise or disguise-as-deception, allowing them to prey on other creatures as a source of food.
Travelling the globe for his extensive fieldwork, O’Hanlon invites us inside the complex micro worlds of everything from plants, leaves and twigs to birds, praying mantises, rattlesnakes, tigers, flowers, deep-sea shrimp, spiders and birds. He explores their clever use of illusions that are capable of fooling even the sharpest senses through masterful manipulations of the perception and appearance of light, depth and colour.
O’Hanlon opens with an account of deep-sea diving as a teenager. He remembers descending from the ocean’s surface to land on its darker, murkier bottom and how his uncle pulled out a piece of blue plastic. Moments later, he illuminated the seemingly blue plastic with a small dive torch, revealing that it was not blue but, rather, bright red. Likewise, the sand wasn’t the muddy grey that it appeared to the human eye but instead a vivid orange. It was in that moment of revelation that O’Hanlon’s fascination with the trickery of nature was ignited.
Across nine chapters, he explores the science and art of camouflage, mimicry and masquerade, and the art and magic of misdirection, deception and lies in nature, and even the ways in which we, as humans, can find inspiration in natural illusion and deception. One of the most fascinating sections of the book deals with the perception of light and the ways in which the depths at which light falls, fragments and is absorbed can trick not only the human eye but also the eyesight of animals on land and at sea.
O’Hanlon points out that in order to fully understand how camouflage and mimicry work in nature, we must understand how other animals perceive the world. His impressive combination of fieldwork and research reveals how an animal’s perception adds even greater complexity to the not so intuitive subjects of camouflage and background matching, eventually allowing him to explain how it is that a bright orange tiger – which isn’t actually orange at all but only appears so – can so masterfully disappear within a forest of green leaves. It is only one of the many fascinating facts contained in this well-written, enormously interesting and engaging book.
NewSouth, 240pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 22, 2025 as "Liars, Cheats and Copycats".
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