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Müllerian mimicry was first identified in tropical butterflies that shared colourful wing patterns, but it is found in many groups of insects such as bumblebees, and other animals such as poison frogs and coral snakes. The mimicry need not be visual; for example, many snakes share auditory warning signals. Similarly, the defences involved are ...
Bumblebees form Mullerian rings of species, and they do often exhibit polymorphism. The hoverfly species mimicking bumblebees are generally accurate mimics, and many of their species are polymorphic. Many of the polymorphisms are different between the sexes, for example by the mimicry being limited to one sex only.
Nudibranch molluscs are the most commonly cited examples of aposematism in marine ecosystems, but the evidence for this has been contested, [37] mostly because (1) there are few examples of mimicry among species, (2) many species are nocturnal or cryptic, and (3) bright colours at the red end of the colour spectrum are rapidly attenuated as a ...
Inter-sexual mimicry (a type of automimicry, as it is within a single species) occurs when individuals of one sex in a species mimic members of the opposite sex to facilitate sneak mating. An example is the three male forms of the marine isopod Paracerceis sculpta. Alpha males are the largest and guard a harem of females. Beta males mimic ...
Its common names include mimic poison frog and poison arrow frog, [2] [3] and it is one of the best known dart frogs. [4] It was discovered in the late 1980s by Rainer Schulte who later split it up into more subspecies; describing each as a specific color morph, and sometimes having a separate behavioral pattern.
Examples include many moth, butterfly, and fish species that have "eye-spots". These are large dark markings that help prey escape by causing predators to attack a false target. For example, the gray hairstreak (Strymon melinus) shows the false head at its rear; it has a better chance of surviving an attack to that part than an attack to the head.
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 ...
Both Batesian mimicry and Müllerian mimicry are treated as adaptive resemblance, much like camouflage, while a chapter is devoted to the mimicry and behaviour of the cuckoo. The concluding chapter admits that the book's force is cumulative, consisting of many small steps of reasoning, and being a wartime book, compares animal to military ...