the flashy escape: support for dynamic flash colouration as anti-predator defence

Dynamic flash colouration is type of antipredator colouration where intermittently appearing colour patterns in moving animals misdirect predator attacks by obscuring the precise location and trajectory of the moving prey. Birds and butterflies with differing dorsoventral wing colouration or iridescent surface structures may potentially benefit from such effects. However, we lack an understanding of what makes for an effective dynamic flash colour design, and how much it benefits the carrier. Here, we test the effect of colour flashing using small passerine birds preying upon colourful, moving, virtual ‘prey’ stimuli on a touchscreen. We show that at fast speeds, green-to-blue flashing colour patterns can reduce the likelihood of pecks hitting the target, induce greater error in targeting accuracy and increase the number of pecks at a stimulus relative to similarly coloured non-flashing targets. Our results support the idea that dynamic flash colouration can deflect predatory attacks a..., Behavioural experiments with wild Eurasian bluetits (Cyanistes caeruleus) using a custom-built Touchscreen Operant Chamber (TOC) with a touchscreen specially made for bird beak. The program created for testing birds with the TOC system collected all the relevant information that was processed minimally before analysing the data with RStudio., , # The flashy escape: Support for dynamic flash colouration as anti-predator defence

## Description of the data and file structure

The dataset used in this experiment was gained from a touchscreen in the Touchscreen Operant Chamber (TOC) using Eurasian blue tits (*Cyanistes caeruleus*) as study subjects. In the experiment, wild birds were used to test if colour flashing affects the catching of moving stimuli on a touchscreen. The two data files are in CSV file format.

The main dataset is called “**TOC_data_2**”, consisting of recorded touches to the TOC touchscreen (i.e., each row represents a peck by a bird to the screen). TOC_data_2 includes the following: the ID of the study subjects (bird ID), session ID (SessionName), stimulus ID (TargetID), binomial information on whether the stimulus was hit (TargetKilledBinary), peck distance to stimulus edge (DistToStimEdge), stimulus speed (Speed_cm_s), and stimulus colour (StimCol).

Colour abbreviations are G = green, B = blue, LG = ligh...