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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.
Batesian vs Müllerian mimicry: the former is deceptive, the latter honest. Mimicry is an evolved resemblance between an organism and another object, often an organism of another species. Mimicry may evolve between different species, or between individuals of the same species.
For example, the hornet moth is a deceptive mimic of the yellowjacket wasp; it resembles the wasp, but has no sting. A predator which avoids the wasp will to some degree also avoid the moth. 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 ...
This is called Batesian mimicry. Pipevine swallowtails may also be involved with Müllerian mimicry, in which two distasteful species resemble each other, and thus act as a mimic and model; certain millipede species look like pipevine larvae and release hydrogen cyanide when in danger. [10] [17]
Most of these octopuses use Batesian mimicry, selecting an organism repulsive to predators as a model. [33] [34] In Müllerian mimicry, two or more aposematic forms share the same warning signals, [27] [35] as in viceroy and monarch butterflies. Birds avoid eating both species because their wing patterns honestly signal their unpleasant taste. [28]
Such a mimicry complex is referred to as Batesian and is most commonly known by the mimicry by the limenitidine viceroy butterfly of the inedible danaine monarch. Later research has discovered that the viceroy is, in fact more toxic than the monarch and this resemblance should be considered as a case of Müllerian mimicry.
Another, rather complicated example occurs in the Batesian mimicry complex between a harmless mimic, the scarlet kingsnake (Lampropeltis elapsoides), and the model, the eastern coral snake (Micrurus fulvius), in locations where the model and mimic were in deep sympatry, the phenotype of the scarlet kingsnake was quite variable due to relaxed ...
Batesian mimicry, named for the 19th century naturalist Henry Walter Bates who first noted the effect in 1861, "provides numerous excellent examples of natural selection" [16] at work. The evolutionary entomologist James Mallet noted that mimicry was "arguably the oldest Darwinian theory not attributable to Darwin."