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Edward Bagnall Poulton's 1890 book, The Colours of Animals, renamed Wallace's concept of warning colours "aposematic" coloration, as well as supporting Darwin's then unpopular theories of natural selection and sexual selection. [18] Poulton's explanations of coloration are emphatically Darwinian. For example, on aposematic coloration he wrote that
The reviewer, noting Wallace's different opinion, has no difficulty with Poulton's view of sexual selection, that it is "due to an aesthetic sense in the [female] animals", [11] and likes Poulton's expression that "Natural Selection is a qualifying examination which must be passed by all candidates for honours; Sexual Selection is an honours ...
According to Charles Darwin's 1859 theory of natural selection, features such as coloration evolved by providing individual animals with a reproductive advantage. For example, individuals with slightly better camouflage than others of the same species would, on average, leave more offspring.
Darwin does not seem to have responded to this information, possibly because he thought natural selection would be a much slower process. [19] A scientific explanation of moth coloration was only published in 1896, 14 years after Darwin's death, when J. W. Tutt explicitly linked peppered moth melanism to natural selection. [16]
Coincident disruptive coloration is seen in other amphibians including the common frog, Rana temporaria, in which the dark and light bands that cross the body and hind legs coincide in the resting position, joining separate anatomical structures visually and breaking up and taking attention away from the body's actual outlines.
The coloration of the Papuan frogmouth Podargus papuensis, its outline disrupted by its plumage, its eye concealed in a stripe, is an effective anti-predator adaptation. Disruptive coloration (also known as disruptive camouflage or disruptive patterning ) is a form of camouflage that works by breaking up the outlines of an animal, soldier or ...
As a natural history narrative on what has become an intensely researched experimental subject, [9] Adaptive Coloration could be thought obsolete, but instead, Peter Forbes observes "But Cott's book is still valuable today for its enormous range, for its passionate exposition of the theories of mimicry and camouflage". [7]
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 ...