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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
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]
Evidence for sexual selection Male argus pheasant (Argusianus argus) displaying to a female, from Richard Lydekker's Royal Natural History, 1895.[1]Poulton strongly supports Darwin both on the general theme of natural selection, and on the power of sexual selection in species which are sexually dimorphic (where, usually, the male is showier than the female):
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]
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.
Müllerian mimicry is a natural phenomenon in which two or more well-defended species, often foul-tasting and sharing common predators, have come to mimic each other's honest warning signals, to their mutual benefit. The benefit to Müllerian mimics is that predators only need one unpleasant encounter with one member of a set of Müllerian ...
The maintenance of the ancestral flower color in the allopatric population is favored weakly by selection, where the derived color in the sympatric population is being driven by strong selection. [56] Similarly, in P. pilosa and P. glaberrima, character displacement of petal color has been driven by selection, aided by pollen discrimination. [57]