Hi. It's Mr. Andersen and in this podcast I'm going to talk about aposematic coloration.
Or another way to say that is warning coloration. So basically when we look at a blue ring octopus
or a flamboyant cuttlefish or a poison dart frog, they're telling us stay away. I'm dangerous.
I'm poisonous. And so they're just warning us of possible danger. And we start to associate
that color with that danger. And so as living predators we tend to avoid things that are
brightly colored. Now if you look at this, Wilson's Bird of Paradise, this is not colorful
because it's toxic or poisonous. And in fact Darwin was the first one to figure out that
it's sexual selection that's accounting for this beautiful coloration in this male bird
of paradise. But the other person who came up with the idea of natural selection, Alfred
Wallace, remember about thirty years after Darwin, he suggested that when you have things
like this, things like these hornets right here. Basically what they're doing is they
have this bright coloration because they're warning that they are poisonous. That they
could sting you and cause damage to you. And so sometimes it doesn't mean that you're going
to die from things that are brightly colored. Like a ladybug, if you were to eat one they
taste awful. Same thing with a tiger moth or even a skunk. They're just reminding you
by being brightly colored that something is not right. Something is going to be awful.
And you start to associate, once you try to eat on of those things. Or if we look at a
black widow spider. This red coloration is telling you that they actually are poisonous.
You could die. And a velvet ant, which I remember right is actually a wasp. Even though it looks
like an ant. This coloration is telling you that they're really really dangerous. Or pufferfish
the same way. That flamboyant color says stay away. And so once you have poison, once you
have this coloration out in nature, then nature starts to play with that. And what I mean
is that this right here is a coral snake. And this right here is a milk snake. This
coral snake is incredibly dangerous. If it were to bite you it has a neurotoxin. The
milk snake can do nothing to you. And so what I'm talking about is mimicry. And in fact
there's a saying if red touches yellow you're a dead fellow. If red touches black, you're
okay jack. To kind of tell the difference between the two. But they didn't probably
evolve in response to humans who could come up with rhyming sayings to remember which
one is poisonous. They evolved in response to other predators and their environment.
And so we call this Batesian mimicry. And it comes from this guy right here. His name
is Henry Bates. He actually worked with Alfred Wallace and went into the Amazon. And if you
were a biologist back in the day you were packing heat. You can see he has a gun here
because he's pretty much shooting anything he can see so he can collect those specimens.
Send them back to museums in Europe. And that's kind of the way to finance his trip. So he
spent years and years in the Amazon doing that. But what he noticed is he'd have mimics.
So you would see two types of butterflies. They almost look exactly the same, but they're
different. They're of different families. Or these ones look exactly the same but they're
of different families. And in this case one of them would be toxic. In other words birds
when they would eat, it just tasted awful and they would spit it right out. And the
other one wasn't. And so it was gaining protection by mimicking that other toxic or poisonous
species. And then we have what's called Müllerian mimicry. It's named after Fritz Müller who
was a German naturalist. He also worked in and moved to Brazil. And basically what we
found is that's one type of mimicry. But there's also genuine mimicry where they're all mimicking
each other to get group protection. And so if you look at these things right here, like
a yellow jacket or a bumble bee or wasp or all of these, the hornet over here, they all
pretty much look the same. So they're all yellow with black bands. And why are they
doing that? Well they're gaining protection by having the same signal. In other words
you don't have to be bit by a bee and then a wasp and then a hornet to realize that yellow
and those black stripes are bad. And so this is Müllerian mimicry, where they all gain
protection from the same coloration. When I was in elementary I remember hearing the
story of the monarch butterfly and the viceroy butterfly. And the story went that the monarch
butterfly tasted incredibly bad or it was toxic to birds. They'd eat one, they'd spit
it right out. But the idea was that the viceroy wasn't. And that birds could eat that. But
they wouldn't because it was a mimic of the monarch. In other words it was a Batesian
mimic or showing Batesian mimicry. Nobody really got around to actually testing it.
And what they found is that the Viceroy is toxic as well. Tastes really bad to birds.
And so now it would be Müllerian mimicry. They're both gaining protection between those
two. And so aposematic coloration simply means stay away. It means I'm toxic. I'm dangerous.
Or I could be mimicking something that's toxic and dangerous. And I hope that's helpful.