Why do fawns have spots?

Camouflage in dappled light. A fawn's strategy for its first weeks is not to run - it cannot outrun anything - but to lie completely still in undergrowth while the mother feeds elsewhere, and the spots break up its outline against a floor of sunlight and shadow. They fade as the animal grows into an age where running is an option.

The mother's absence is deliberate and is the source of an annual problem. A doe stays away precisely because her scent and movement would draw predators to the fawn, returning only to nurse. Fawns are also nearly odourless in those first weeks. Every spring, wildlife rescues receive fawns picked up by people who believed they were abandoned, and most of them were not.

The pattern turns up independently across unrelated animals with the same problem - young wild boar, tapirs and lion cubs are all spotted or striped and lose it with age. It is a repeated evolutionary answer to a specific and short-lived vulnerability, and one of the tidier illustrations that camouflage is designed against a particular background rather than being generically concealing.