Comparative strategies of pigmentary regulation in invertebrates

This brief survey of color change strategies among invertebrates has dealt mainly with the diversity encountered in three aspects of their pigment cell biology: (1) the types of chromatophores they possess, (2) the control of color changes by nerves or hormones if the chromatophores are not acting only as independent effectors and (3) the functions of the physiological color changes these animals exhibit. Of these three topics, much less is known about the last one, the functions of the color changes, than about the first two. There has been much hypothesizing about the functions of color changes and the advantages such changes presumably confer, but relatively few data have been generated to support the hypotheses.