Do Chameleons Really Change Color to Camouflage?
Everyone learns the same fact about chameleons as a kid: they change color to blend into their surroundings. Over the past decade, a wave of "well, actually" articles has pushed back — it's not camouflage at all, they say, it's mood and communication, and the blending-in idea is a myth. That correction is now repeated almost as confidently as the fact it replaced. We went looking for the actual research behind the reversal, and found it covers a much narrower slice of "chameleons" than most of the pages repeating it let on.
The claim
Chameleons change color primarily to communicate with other chameleons — mood, aggression, courtship — not, as commonly believed, to camouflage themselves against their surroundings.
Source trail
Two real studies sit behind the correction. Devi Stuart-Fox and Adnan Moussalli's 2008 PLoS Biology paper compared 21 lineages of southern African dwarf chameleons (genus Bradypodion) and found "no evidence for the crypsis hypothesis" — species with more dramatic color-change ability didn't evolve it to match more backgrounds; they evolved it to show off more conspicuous social signals. A 2015 Nature Communications paper by Jérémie Teyssier, Suzanne Saenko, Dirk van der Marel and Michel Milinkovitch then explained the physical mechanism — panther chameleons shift color by tuning a lattice of nanocrystals in their skin — and got wide science-press coverage. Somewhere in the retelling, a mechanism study of one species and an evolutionary study of one genus merged into a blanket claim about "chameleons," the whole family of roughly 200 species, and picked up a specific, orderable ranking (communication first, camouflage last) that neither paper actually states.
What's confirmed
- The nanocrystal mechanism is real, but the paper describing it never ranks camouflage below communication. Teyssier et al., "Photonic crystals cause active colour change in chameleons," Nature Communications 6, article 6368, published 10 March 2015 — fetched directly via its PubMed Central mirror (checked 2026-08-25) after nature.com's own page redirected this session's fetch tool to a login gate. The study centers on the panther chameleon (Furcifer pardalis) with three other chameleon species used for comparison, and states the dual iridophore-layer arrangement "constitutes an evolutionary novelty for chameleons that allows some species to combine efficient camouflage with spectacular display" — camouflage and display named as complementary abilities, not ranked against each other.
- The actual "communication over camouflage" ranking traces to one 2008 study of one genus — not to the 2015 mechanism paper it usually gets bundled with. Stuart-Fox and Moussalli, "Selection for Social Signalling Drives the Evolution of Colour Change in Chameleons," PLoS Biology 6(1): e25, published 29 January 2008 — fetched directly (checked 2026-08-25). Across 21 lineages of Bradypodion, the paper reports finding "no evidence for the crypsis hypothesis" as the driver of dramatic color-change evolution, concluding instead that "selection for conspicuous social signals drives the evolution of colour change in this system." "This system" is the qualifier that drops out of most retellings: one southern African genus, and specifically the evolutionary origin of the color-change trait — not a claim that any given chameleon's day-to-day color shifts are never for camouflage.
- The same two researchers, the same year, found real predator-specific camouflage in one of those very chameleons. Stuart-Fox, Moussalli and Whiting, "Predator-specific camouflage in chameleons," Biology Letters 4(4): 326–329, published 20 May 2008 — fetched directly (checked 2026-08-25). Testing Bradypodion taeniabronchum against models of a bird predator and a snake predator with different color vision, the chameleons matched their background more closely when a bird — the sharper-eyed predator — was present. Real, measured camouflage, adjusted specifically to who's watching, published by the same lab in the same year as the "no evidence for crypsis" paper above.
- A third, different chameleon genus, tested directly for camouflage for the first time in August 2025, also showed real background matching. Major, Hesten, Stipala, Cant, Stevens and Troscianko, "Flap-necked chameleons change colour to match their background," Biology Letters 21(8): 20250134, published 6 August 2025 — fetched directly (checked 2026-08-25) after the Royal Society's own publisher page returned HTTP 403 to a direct fetch this session. Flap-necked chameleons (Chamaeleo dilepis) placed against controlled, colored backgrounds matched brightness against black backgrounds and hue against yellow ones — real camouflage, with a named limit: they did not match pattern variation, "unlike popular culture portrayals." Newer than every myth-busting page we checked for this brief, and not reflected on any of them.
- At least one small site's ranking claim cites a real paper that has nothing to do with color, confirmed by reading that paper directly. strangeanimals.info (fetched directly, checked 2026-08-25) states an explicit order — "1. Communication (Primary) 2. Thermoregulation (Secondary) 3. Camouflage (Tertiary)" — and cites two studies by name for it: Teyssier et al. 2015, above, and "Anderson et al. 2016." That second paper, Christopher V. Anderson, "Off like a shot: scaling of ballistic tongue projection reveals extremely high performance in small chameleons," Scientific Reports 6, article 18625, published 4 January 2016 — fetched directly (checked 2026-08-25) — is entirely about how fast and hard a chameleon's tongue strikes prey. It does not mention color change, camouflage, or communication anywhere.
- A different site skips citations entirely, and its own six-year-old comment section already caught the problem. The Naked Scientists (fetched directly, checked 2026-08-25), dated 09 May 2010 — five years before the 2015 mechanism paper and seven before the 2015 crypsis paper it would need to be leaning on even existed — states flatly "there is this myth that chameleons change colour to blend in with their surroundings, but this is actually not true," with no citation of any kind. A comment posted to the same page on 24 March 2019, signed "littlebitofsick," disputes this directly ("the common myth perpetuated by the internet and sites like this is that chameleons DON'T change color for camouflage") and links two papers that both trace back to the same predator-specific-camouflage study above — one directly, one as a reference inside a 2017 review article we also fetched directly to confirm the citation. The original 2010 article text is unchanged as of this check.
What isn't
- Whether "communication first, camouflage last" holds as a general rule across chameleons as a family, not just within one genus. Nothing we found runs the Stuart-Fox 2008 comparative method — many lineages, one statistical test — across the roughly 200 described chameleon species outside Bradypodion. Until that exists, extending its specific result to "chameleons" broadly is a generalization the source itself doesn't make.
- Where the specific three-tier ranking itself first appeared. Neither primary paper repeatedly cited for it — the 2008 evolutionary study or the 2015 mechanism study — states an ordered ranking of communication, thermoregulation and camouflage. We could not trace the ranking, as a specific ordered list, to any primary source.
- Whether The Naked Scientists' page has been corrected since 2019. The disputing comment and its two linked papers have sat below the unchanged original text for more than six years as of this check; nothing on the page acknowledges it.
Verdict
Both halves of this back-and-forth are real, and both are narrower than their popular versions. The 2008 study behind "it's not really camouflage" found exactly that — but only for one southern African genus, and only for why dramatic color-change ability evolved in the first place, not for whether any given color shift, in any given species, is ever used to hide. The same research group's own second paper that year, and a fresh 2025 study on an unrelated genus, both found real camouflage matching when they actually tested for it directly. The tidy "communication, not camouflage" verdict generalizes a genuine, narrow finding across a family the size of a small country's bird list — and at least one site making that generalization backs it with a citation about tongue speed.