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Batesian mimicry is a form of mimicry where a harmless species has evolved to imitate the warning signals of a harmful species directed at a predator of them both. It is named after the English naturalist Henry Walter Bates , who worked on butterflies in the rainforests of Brazil.
Mimicry is not limited to animals; in Pouyannian mimicry, an orchid flower is the mimic, resembling a female bee, its model; the dupe is the male bee of the same species, which tries to copulate with the flower, enabling it to transfer pollen, so the mimicry is again bipolar.
Aggressive mimicry stands in semantic contrast with defensive mimicry, where it is the prey that acts as a mimic, with predators being duped. Defensive mimicry includes the well-known Batesian and Müllerian forms of mimicry, where the mimic shares outward characteristics with an aposematic or harmful model. In Batesian mimicry, the mimic is ...
This is known as Batesian mimicry, after Henry Walter Bates, a British naturalist who studied Amazonian butterflies in the second half of the 19th century. [79] Batesian mimicry is frequency dependent: it is most effective when the ratio of mimic to model is low; otherwise, predators will encounter the mimic too often. [80] [81]
Batesian mimicry is a form of defense that allows a harmless species to mimic the appearance of a toxic, noxious, or harmful species to protect itself from predators. By mimicking the appearance of a harmful species, a predator is less likely to attack the species due to its awareness of the signal of warning color patterns.
Deception in animals is the voluntary or involuntary transmission of misinformation by one animal to another, of the same or different species, in a way that misleads the other animal. The psychology scholar Robert Mitchell identifies four levels of deception in animals.
Research has argued that the viceroy may be unpalatable to avian predators. If that is the case, then the viceroy butterfly displays Müllerian mimicry, and both viceroy and monarch are co-mimics of each other. [17] Some literature suggests that the queen-viceroy may not be a good model-mimic pair for Batesian mimicry.
The idea behind Batesian mimicry is that predators that have tried to eat the unpalatable species learn to associate its colors and markings with an unpleasant taste. This results in the predator learning to avoid species displaying similar colours and markings, including Batesian mimics, which are in effect parasitic on the chemical or other ...