“Crypsis,” as you should all know by now, is just a fancy scientific word for “camouflage.” Often cryptic animals will hide from predators by mimicking their background, but here’s a case in which one part of an animal mimics the other. Have a look first and see if you can figure out what’s going on. […]
This video was just posted, and has only 30 views, so you can be one of the first to see a nice short movie (1.5 minutes) of a lichen mantis (Oxypilus sp., sometimes called “boxing mantids”)—another amazing example of animal camouflage that is new to me. The video is by one Michael Whitehead. h/t: Matthew […]
“Aposematic coloration,” as I’ve mentioned before, is a form of self-advertisement in animals that are toxic, distasteful, or dangerous, and the bright colors—often orange, black, red, and yellow—tell the predator to leave the animal alone. (It’s also called “warning coloration”.) The first brightly-colored mutants would seem to be disadvantageous, as the predator hasn’t yet learned […]
The estimable Matthew Cobb called my attention to this post on The Featured Creature, which he found via the Facebook page of “Spider” Dave Penney, a freelance scientist (!) with his own publishing company. Have a look at this moth. If you saw it in the wild, would you have any idea what the wing pattern […]
I am off to Augusta today to discuss the (in)compatibility between science and faith. If you’re there and have a book, don’t forget the secret word. In the meantime, reader George sent me a superb case of mimicry, posted on Neatorama’s Facebook page. I’ll leave it to the readers to identify it:
Oddly, the Guardian has published an account of a new insect species by Quentin Wheeler, a systematist at Arizona State University and director of the International Institute for Species Exploration. (He has also proposed a new species concept, but the less said about that the better.) His article, however, is intriguing, for it describes a […]
Alert reader Michael called my attention to a post on fauna that highlighted a moth with a cryptic caterpillar. The moth is the wavy emerald moth (Synchlora aerata), and the adult looks like this: (photo from Bug Guide) The interesting thing about this beast is that the caterpillar practices what I call “cultural mimicry”: it […]
