Abstract
Toxic prey species living in the same environment have long been thought to mutually benefit from having the same warning signal by sharing the education of naïve predators. In contrast, ‘saturation theory’ predicts that predators are physiologically limited by the amount of toxin that they can eat in a given time period. Therefore, sympatric species that contain the same toxin should mutually benefit from reduced predation even when they are visually distinct, reducing the benefits to visual mimicry. For the first time, we found that mutualism can occur between unequally defended prey that are visually distinct, although the benefits to each prey type depends on the predators' abilities and/or motivation to visually discriminate between them. Furthermore, we found that this variability in predatory behaviour had a significant impact on the benefits of mimicry for unequally defended prey. Our results demonstrate that variability in the foraging decisions of predators can have a significant effect on the benefits of shared toxicity and visual mimicry between sympatric species, and highlights the need to consider how predators exert selection pressures on models and mimics over their entire lifetimes.
Highlights
Aposematic prey often defend themselves with toxins and advertise their toxicity to potential predators using conspicuous warning signals [1]
The widely held view is that aposematism is a defensive strategy aimed at naıve predators, with warning coloration evoking neophobia and dietary conservatism [2,3,4,5], and being easier to learn to associate with toxicity compared to cryptic coloration [6]
We have shown for the first time that toxin mutualism can exist between unequally defended prey, we cannot conclude that this was due to them becoming saturated with this compound
Summary
Aposematic prey often defend themselves with toxins and advertise their toxicity to potential predators using conspicuous warning signals [1]. The widely held view is that aposematism is a defensive strategy aimed at naıve predators, with warning coloration evoking neophobia and dietary conservatism [2,3,4,5], and being easier to learn to associate with toxicity compared to cryptic coloration [6]. Predators, both in the wild and in the laboratory, continue to eat toxic prey even when they have learned that they contain toxin, i.e. when they are ‘educated’ [7,8,9,10,11,12]. This gap in our knowledge means that we cannot fully understand the role of predator cognition in the evolution of aposematism and mimicry
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