Field evidence for colour mimicry overshadowing morphological mimicry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Imperfect mimicry may be maintained when the various components of an aposematic signal have different salience for predators. Experimental laboratory studies provide robust evidence for this phenomenon. Yet, evidence from natural settings remains scarce. We studied how natural bird predators assess multiple features in a multicomponent aposematic signal in the Neotropical 'clear wing complex' mimicry ring, dominated by glasswing butterflies. We evaluated two components of the aposematic signal, wing colouration and wing morphology, in a predation experiment based on artificial replicas of glasswing butterflies (model) and Polythoridae damselflies (mimics) in their natural habitat. We also studied the extent of the colour aposematic signal in the local insect community. Finally, we inspected the nanostructures responsible for this convergent colour signal, expected to highly differ between these phylogenetically distinct species. Our results provide direct evidence for a stronger salience of wing colouration than wing morphology, as well as stronger selection on imperfect than in perfect colour mimics. Additionally, investigations of how birds perceive wing colouration of the local insect community provides further evidence that a UV-reflective white colouration is being selected as the colour aposematic signal of the mimicry ring. Using electron microscopy, we also suggest that damselflies have convergently evolved the warning colouration through a pre-adaptation. These findings provide a solid complement to previous experimental evidence suggesting a key influence of the cognitive assessment of predators driving the evolution of aposematic signals and mimicry rings.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".