How did all that get started? I mean I know there are flies that mimic bees and other butterflies that mimic poisonous Monarchs, but how did that develop? I don’t know of insects have the level of intelligence to facilitate such things. But it just seems like an almost human level intellect aspect, mimicking something deadly to avoid harm. Of course I’m not saying it is so,but I just wondered how it happened. How did those animals “know” (for lack of a better word).
The same way that you knew how to be born with brown eyes, or knew how to be born with a single nose between them instead of one on each side. And that is that they don’t know in any way whatsoever what to be born looking like. It just happens.
Here’s a classic example of how a random mutation can change a local insect to match changing conditions.
Peppered moth evolution
They don’t “know.”
A random variation in coloration or form makes a few individuals in a population survive slightly more than their siblings without this variation.
Lather, rinse, repeat for generations and you get a handful of remarkable mimic species.
If they “knew” don’t you think there would be many more examples?
Have scientists studied the “arms race” factor in this kind of mimicry? Say there’s a poisonous species that has distinctive markings to “warn” prey from eating it. Predators evolve to not eat animals with those markings. Then another species, which is not poisonous, evolves the same distinctive markings. This species will benefit from the existing adaptation in predators.
But the new species is weakening the value of the trait. After all, it’s no longer true that every animal with these markings are poisonous. Some of them are now safe to eat. So predators are going to evolve away from avoiding eating these animals. The value of the warning is diluted by all of the other animals that are imitating the warning without imitating the danger.
The dangerous species might adapt to this new environment by evolving new markings. But the value of these markings require co-evolution; they only work as warnings when predators evolve the trait of recognizing and heeding the warning. So it would be a race for the dangerous species to see whether the predator species would evolve to avoid the new warnings quicker than the mimic species would evolve to imitate them.
It seems odd that the species mimicking the poisonous one doesn’t seem to “know” that said species is poisonous. That’s what I am getting at.
Unless the mimic butterfly was carnivorous, how would they “know” that Monarch butterflies are poisonous?
To anthropomorphize, they don’t ask Monarchs “Hey, how come you guys don’t get eaten by xxxxx”, and even if they could Monarchs don’t know they are poisonous.
They don’t ask xxxxx, “Hey, how come you guys don’t eat Monarchs” and even if they could xxxxx would reply “don’t you Monarchs know you make me sick?”
Behaviour is not necessarily evolutionary.
Young predator grabs it’s first victim with yellow spots and it happens to be a mimic. “Yum”.
Next prey victim with yellow spots happens to be poisonous. “Shit, I’m not eating any more of these suckers”.
If when the next generation arrives they each go through the same learning curve then there is no evolution occurring.
If the next generation has improved capability to distinguish between poisonous and mimic or to tolerate the poison, then that’s definitely evolution in progress.
It would seem even more odd if it “knew” any such thing.
There is, if the predator who ate the bug with yellow spots dies and those who don’t eat any bugs with yellow spots survive. Behavior isn’t evolutionary, but it does filter evolutionary traits.
They don’t need to know anything. There is a selective pressure at work here. A long time ago, tasty viceroy butterflies maybe didn’t look so much like toxic monarch butterflies, and they (the viceroys) got eaten by birds a lot. And then by random mutation, a viceroy butterfly was born that looked a bit more like a monarch; birds left it alone, and it survived to reproduce. Its genetic heirs tended to survive at a greater rate than its peers who looked very distinct from monarchs, and so over time that mimicry trait propagated throughout the species. Random mutations occasionally produced offspring that caused closer and closer resemblance to monarchs because those individuals were even more likely to survive to reproduce.
No knowledge on the part of the viceroy about the monarch’s toxicity is required: the interplay of genetic variations/mutations and survival of the fittest/natural selection result in it being born looking a certain way that makes it more likely to survive/propagate.