Many animals, both victims and predators, use odor masking feature. Animals try to mask their scent so that certain types of living beings could not detect them. People, who mainly rely on sight, may think of such camouflage as inadequate. However, in nature the ability to detect prey or enemy by smell is no less common than the visual aspect. Therefore, species that do not have a scent are often invisible to the world.

It was long believed that this masking can be misleading only to representatives of the same species. There is a certain "competition" between olfactory receptors and olfactory signaling molecules. If in the course of evolution a mutation occurs that slightly alters the structure of the molecule, the receptors may not be able to detect it. But because these same olfactory receptors of different animals are different, it is difficult to create a camouflage that would deceive them all.