Rethinking Bad Taste
How much mimicry is outright cheating?
By Susan Milius
Talking to evolutionary biologists Hannah Rowland and Mike Speed can shake your faith in a supposedly settled area of science. Generations of textbooks have presented animal mimicry as one of the marvels of evolution, allowing two species to confound their predators by looking alike. Marvel of evolution it is, but surprisingly for such a high-profile example, researchers still have a lot of questions about how mimicry works.
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In the usual classroom explanation, there are equal partners and fakers among the mimics. The equal partners are, for example, two butterflies that look like each other and that both carry a foul-tasting toxin. A bird that bites either one of them gets a lesson in what not to eat. Since there are two species, not as many of either one have to get killed or injured to educate the latest generation of local birds. The two species share the cost of training the predators.