Ant mimicry
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Ant mimicry or myrmecomorphy is mimicry of ants by other organisms, mainly arthropods. It has independently evolved over 70 times in different species. Ants are abundant all over the world, and potent
Top: An ant in Mozambique Bottom: An ant-mimicking spider, Myrmarachne
The thick waist of the Mirid ant bug, Myrmecoris gracilis, is camouflaged with white markings.
Diolenius phrynoides
Sarinda hentzi
Mimicry
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In evolutionary biology, mimicry is the evolved resemblance of an organism to something else, often another organism of a different species. Mimicry may evolve between different species, or between in
Ant mimicry
…Ant mimicry or myrmecomorphy is mimicry of ants by other organisms, mainly arthropods. It has independently evolved over 70 times in different species. Ants are abundant all over the world…
Many insects including hoverflies (C, D, E) and the wasp beetle (F) are Batesian mimics of stinging wasps (A, B), which are Müllerian mimics of each other.
In 1879, Fritz Müller created the first mathematical model of mimicry to explain why distasteful species should evolve similar appearances.
Plate from Henry Walter Bates's 1862 paper illustrating Batesian mimicry between harmless Dismorphia species (top and third row) and distasteful Ithomiini (Nymphalidae, second and bottom row).
Mutual Müllerian mimicry in distasteful Heliconius butterflies. Plate LXII from Müller's collected writings, 1881