Adaptive significance of death feigning posture as a specialized inducible defence against gape-limited predators.

Death feigning is fairly common in a number of taxa, but the adaptive significance of this behaviour is still unclear and has seldom been tested. To date, all proposed hypotheses have assumed that prey manage to escape predation by sending a death-mimicking signal, although death-feigning postures are markedly different from those of dead animals. Moreover, the efficacy of this technique may largely depend on the foraging mode of the predator; death feigning seldom works with sit-and-wait predators that make the decision to attack and consume prey within a very brief time.