Category: mimicry and crypsis

How did warning coloration evolve?

June 5, 2023 • 9:30 am

Aposematic coloration, often called “warning coloration”, is the presence of bright or conspicuous colors or patterns in animals that are toxic, noxious, dangerous, or poisonous to predators. Here’s an example from Wikipedia, the granular poison frog (Oophaga granulifera). Like many dendrobatid frogs, this has a number of poison alkaloids in its skin, and they have been used in Central and South America to tip arrows or darts, which can kill mammals. Any predator that tried to eat one of these would probably be dead, or at least very ill.

My own frog, Atelopus coynei, looks conspicuous too [but see Lou Jost’s comment below], and may be toxic, but I don’t think people know anything about that:

Atelopus coynei. Photo: Jordy Salazar/EcoMinga

But of course far more animals than amphibians are aposematic. The skunk advertises its toxicity with a pair of conspicuous stripes. Many insects, like ladybugs and some leipidopterans, are also aposematic and toxic, including at least one bird species: see here for a Google image search of aposematic animals.

The colors and patterns, as the name implies, gives their bearers an evolutionary advantage over their presumably camouflaged ancestors, for predators will deliberately avoid the pattern, usually because they’ve learned to recognize and stay away from it because of previous unpleasant experiences. (The avoidance can also be evolved rather than learned, as you’ll see if you think about it. Even if eating one of these kills you, individual predators having less of a propensity to attack the pattern would be favored.)  Usually, however, learning is involved.

But to get that advantage, the aposematic species has to be sufficiently numerous to afford predators a chance to learn and then avoid the next aposematic animal. And this creates an evolutionary problem.

We are pretty sure that aposematic species evolved from camouflaged ones. To get the warning coloration started, there have to be mutations in the camouflaged population that produce individuals with bright colors and patterns, at least in incipient form.

And that’s the rub: the first mutant individual stands a higher chance of being attacked and killed than do cryptic individuals. Even if it’s toxic, it may still get killed or injured by being attacked for being a novel, conspicuous creature.  So how does the adaptation ever spread through the population from a rare initial state?

Previously, as described in the excellent Nature News & Views summary by Tim Caro below (click to read), we had a few answers:

1.) The trait could evolved by kin selection in gregarious animals. While the first mutant individual might be attacked, it might be part of a group of relatives that share that aposematic mutation. Assuming the predator learns to avoid the pattern after killing or hurting the first individual, it would avoid its similarly-colored kin, and that is a form of kin selection on the color/pattern genes that could make them spread.

2.) The trait could have evolved from a state that was conspicuous but not as conspicuous as the animals above. But this runs into the same problem as #1!

3.) The attacked aposematic mutant could avoid being killed by the predator because it smells or tastes bad, or is injured only slightly. If the predator learns from one experience (and some do), then that individual would henceforth be protected from predation, perhaps giving the mutant color/pattern gene an advantage. This seems somewhat likely, and could be tested by exposing naive predators to aposematic prey.

4.) Predators might avoid novel colors or patterns in general since the hunters have a search image for edible species. As Caro says, there’s some evidence for this, too.

But now, in his summary of the original paper, Caro describes a fifth hypothesis that is described in the Science paper below that.  The authors test this interesting hypothesis using phylogenetic data, and it seems to be supported.

Click the original Science paper below to read about the novel hypothesis for the evolution of aposematism. The authors test it in amphibians, but may hold for other creatures as well. You can also find the pdf here , and the reference is at the bottom. 

Again, I’ll try to be brief, but may not succeed. The authors’ hypothesis, which is very clever, is that full aposematic coloration may have evolved, at least in amphibians from an earlier state where it wasn’t clearly visible to predators. This could involve the colors/patterns starting their evolution on the BOTTOM (ventral) side of the animal, which wouldn’t draw attention until the animal was attacked, at which point it could flash its pattern and possibly startle the predator (the predator could also learn from a brief encounter that the prey was toxic).  And the bottom-colored state could itself be of two types: small patches on the ventral surface (PV) or a fully colored ventral surface (FV). This is in contrast to an animal that is fully colored all over its body.

Once the predator started learning what the color/pattern means from the animals that had it on their belly, then the color could evolve to cover the animal, making it fully aposematic.

But how do you test this hypothesis? Well, you could see if predators learn to avoid toxic amphibians that had color patches painted on their belly, but there are few amphibians that are toxic and lack aposematic coloration. No, the authors tested their hypothesis by doing phylogenetic reconstruction: they used living species and their known family tree to deduce what the color/pattern of the ancestors were. This kind of reconstruction, which makes sense if you have enough data, is increasingly used to study evolution.

And so Loeffler-Henry et al. did a big reconstruction of the evolutionary history of amphibians, many of whom were aposematically colored. They used 1106 species, putting each in one of five evolutionary categories:

species cryptic (camouflaged; “cry” in photo below)
species PV (ventral side partly aposematic)
species FV (ventral side fully aposematic)
species fully aposematic all over its body (“conspicuous” or “con” in photo below)
species polymorphic (some individuals are aposematic, others not). There aren’t many of these, and I won’t go into why they are supposed to exist.

Here’s a photo from the paper showing four of the five states (a polymorphic species isn’t shown):

Part of paper’s caption: Cry: cryptic; PV (partially conspicuous venter): cryptic dorsum with conspicuous color present as small patches on normally hidden body parts; FV (fully conspicuous venter): cryptic dorsum with conspicuous colors fully covered on the venter; Con: conspicuous

And here’s the reconstruction of the phylogeny showing the position in the family tree of each of the five states. Click to enlarge:

(From paper): Fig. 2. Ancestral state estimation of each color state (N = 1106 species) in frogs and salamanders. Pie charts at each node show the probabilities of ancestral states. The ancestral state of frogs and salamanders is likely to be cryptic coloration. The hidden color signals (PV and FV) are widespread and have evolved multiple times in different lineages. PV: cryptic dorsum with conspicuous color present as small patches on normally hidden body parts; FV: cryptic dorsum with conspicuous colors fully covered on the venter. See table S11 for photo credits.

There’s a pie diagram at each node of the tree showing the probability that that ancestor had one of the five states scored. I won’t go into the methods for deriving probabilities (in truth, I don’t understand them); but her are the salient points:

1.) Ancestors tend to be cryptic (camouflaged; gray dots), with the possible exception of some salamanders. This comports with the evolutionary view that aposematic coloration was not an ancestral condition but evolved as a defensive adaptation to deter predators.

2.) Full aposematism—the orange state—didn’t appear until later in amphibians, and

3.) . . . it did so generally going through an intermediate state of aposematic coloration on the belly (purple and red species)

4.) The preponderance of purple circles earlier than red ones suggests that the condition of full ventral coloration was preceded in time by the evolution of partial ventral coloration: patches of color that could be flashed but are still less conspicuous to predators than fully belly coloration. This suggestion is supported by statistical analysis of the likelihood of the models, but I’ll skip that.

Now this is an analysis of amphibians, but could apply equally well to other species. In fact, many butterflies that have warning coloration have it on their rear wings, which are covered up when they’re resting. It’s only when they fly, or when a predator startles them, that the aposematic coloration is revealed. Here’s an example: an aposematic butterfly from Ray Cannon’s Nature Notes. It’s the common birdwing (Troides helena), known to be very poisonous since the larvae feed on plants containing toxic aristolochic acids.

And here’s a fully aposematic butterfly:

(from site): Altinote dicaeus callianira – its distinct pattern advertises its unpalatability. Photo: Adrian Hoskins

For a long time the evolution of aposematic coloration posed the problem of what evolutionists call an “adaptive valley”: how do you get from one adaptive state (toxic but camouflaged) to a presumably more adapted state (toxic and brightly colored), when the intermediate evolutionary stage (the first mutant individual) was at a disadvantage: mired in an adaptive valley?  This could not occur by natural selecction since selection cannot favor the less adapted (here, “less avoided”) individuals.

The authors propose a solution to this: an adaptive valley wasn’t crossed because the intermediate state—ventral coloration—did confer a selective advantage on the first mutant individuals.

The authors end the paper by suggesting that their scenario could apply to many species; and it well could:

. . . macroevolutionary studies on animal coloration should take into account these underappreciated hidden signals, which are both common and widespread across the animal kingdom, to advance our understanding of the evolution of antipredator defenses. Indeed, many animal taxa such as snakes, fishes, and a variety of arthropods (see fig. S12 for example groups) include species that are cryptic, are aposematic, and have hidden conspicuous signals. We therefore encourage follow-up studies in other taxa to evaluate the generality of the stepping-stone hypothesis as a route to aposematism.

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Loeffler, K., C. Kang, and T. N. Sherratt.  2023. Evolutionary transitions from camouflage to aposematism: Hidden signals play a pivotal role. Science 379:1136-1140. DOI: 10.1126/science.ade5156

A beautiful planthopper that mimics an ant (with a twist)

July 17, 2020 • 10:00 am

Planthoppers are in the order Hemiptera—the “true bugs”—along with cicadas and aphids, and are in the suborder Auchenorrhyncha. I’ve written about them before: they have all kinds of bizarre appearances that sometimes defy explanation (e.g., these ones).  In 2012 I wrote a report about a strange planthopper (Formiscurra indicus) that mimicked an ant, but the kicker was that the mimicry was described as being limited to one sex: the males. The females looked pretty much like “normal” planthoppers.

Sex-limited mimicry is known in some species, like butterflies, and I discuss it in my 2012 post, but there are reasonable (though untested) explanations for it. Some butterflies, for instance, have mimicry limited to females, with females of a single species varying in appearance across their range to mimic the local distasteful species (“Batesian mimicry“), but males look the same everywhere. That’s usually explained by sexual selection: females have a hardwired search image for males of their species, and while the females may change appearance based on local selection pressures to resemble distasteful “model” species, the males are prevented from doing so because they’d lose more in sexual attractiveness than they’d gain in protection from predation.

That 2012 article appeared in the Guardian (the report has disappeared) but there were no scientific papers describing it. Now, after seven years, one has finally showed up, in the Czech journal Acta Entomologica Musei Nationalis Pragae. Click on the screenshot below to see it and get a free pdf; the reference is at the bottom.

There are actually two species mentioned in this paper: Formiscurra atlas, found in Ethiopia, which was wrongly named in the Guardian report as Formiscurra indicus.  (The latter species, from India, had already been named in 2011.)  In the present paper, published in January of this year, the author (who co-wrote the 2011 paper) formally describes and names Formiscurra atlas, goes into great detail about its unusual morphology, and mention, though not in detail, the fact that in this species only the males are mimics—mimics of ants, or “myrmecomorphs”.

We can ignore the morphological details save that the species, in one sex only, is a mimic.  Here are pictures of a male and female. Fig 1 and 2 show the male, side and dorsal (top) view, respectively, while 3 and 4 show the female. The male has a round protuberance on its head (see the eyes behind it) that makes it look more antlike. The curious thing to me is that, according to the authors, they say that this ball-shaped protuberance evolved to resemble an ant’s abdomen, while to me, and in the pictures of its relative below, it looks like an ant’s head, while the male planthopper’s abdomen has evolved to resemble an ant’s abdomen. I’m not sure whether this is a mistake, but it’s at least clear that one sex but not the other has evolved to resemble an ant.

In Figs. 3 and 4 you see the female of the species, pretty “normal” for a planthopper. She does have a small cylindrical protuberance on her head that may be a vestigial remnant of the larger protuberance in males.

The authors, however, don’t say how they know that these are two sexes of the same species. DNA would tell, but no molecular analyses are described.

 

The authors also provide a photograph of a live specimen of the relative F. indicus, which is remarkably antlike, though I still say that in the first picture below (from the paper), as well as the second (from Wikipedia), the head protuberance is “supposed” to resemble the head rather than the abdomen of the ant:

From Wikipedia’s article on F. indicus. “Male climbing a twig.”

There remains only one thing to consider: why are only the males ant mimics? We know the benefits of ant mimicry, which I described in my earlier post:

Why mimic ants?  Ant mimicry is common in many diverse groups; in fact, Wikipedia has an article on it.  There could be several explanations for why the planthopper is such a mimic.  The mimicry could be aposematic, that is, the ants that are being mimicked are poisonous and distasteful, and predators have learned to avoid them.  By mistaking the leafhopper for an ant, the hoppers gain respite from being eaten, an obvious selective advantage.  Alternatively, the leafhopper could live in an ant colony and gain advantages that way, including protection by being in a group or getting access to the ants’ food. I find this less plausible since ants are good at sniffing out intruders.  And there are undoubtedly other possible reasons for mimicry.

I still think that the advantage of mimicry here is “Batesian”: that is, many ants are distasteful to predators like birds and lizards, as ants are full of poisons and other distasteful or toxic compounds, and very few species have them as a steady diet. If you’ve learned to avoid an ant, then a reproductive advantage accrues to any planthopper (planthoppers are tasty because they feed on sap and vegetation) that looks more like an avoided ant species. And there’s no evidence that these planthoppers are associated with ant colonies.

But on to the burning question: why is mimicry limited to one sex? If the mimics were females and the males were non-mimetic, we might explain it as we do in butterflies: males are constrained not to evolve because females retain the ancestral preference for how a mate “should” look. But in this case the mimics are the males and the females presumably didn’t evolve that much.  I don’t even want to speculate here (nor does author Gnezdilov), except to say that I’d like better evidence that these are indeed two sexes of the same species. Maybe I’ve missed earlier data on that.

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Gnezdilov, V. M. 2019. A new species of the myrmecomorphic planthopper genus Formiscurra (Fulgoroidea: Caliscelidae) from Ethiopia. Acta Entomologica Museu Nationalis Pragae. 59(1): DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/aemnp-2019-0002  Published online:  24 Jan 2020

A stunning case of mimicry

January 21, 2020 • 9:00 am

I don’t remember encountering this case of mimicry, but it’s so amazing that, when I became aware of it from a tweet (yes, Twitter has its uses), I decided to give it a post of its own.

First the tweet, sent to me by Matthew. He added, “This is the Iranian viper, as featured in Seven Worlds, One Planet, made by the BBC. Amazing.”

You don’t need to translate the Spanish, though, as the video below tells all. I swear that when I first watched it, I thought there was a real spider crawling on the snake’s back.

The snake is the spider-tailed horned viper, Pseudocerastes urarachnoides, which has a small range in Western Iran (map from Wikipedia):

It wasn’t described as a new species until 2006 in the paper below (free access); before that it was thought to be the already-describe Persian horned viper. (I guess they overlooked the tail ornament.)

Here’s a photo of the tail “spider” from the paper; the one below that is from Wikipedia. The resemblance may not be precise, but (as you see above), when the ornament is moved about, it looks remarkably like a spider—certainly good enough to fool birds.

In that paper, the authors didn’t know how the tail ornament was used, but were impressed at its spider-like appearance. And they guessed accurately:

This raises the question of the elaborate and sophisticated appearance of the caudal appendage in our new species, as the waving or wriggling motion of a distinctively colored tail tip seems perfectly adequate to attract lizard and anuran prey. We can only speculate that in the case of the present species, the caudal lure serves to deceive a more specific kind of prey, such as shrews or birds. Indeed, ZMGU 1300 [the specimen number] contains an undigested, unidentified passerine bird in the stomach (the feet protruding through the body wall).

Only later, using live captive specimens, did researchers see that the ornament did indeed attract birds that the snake caught and consumed, as in the video above.

Any biologist who sees this is immediately impressed by the ability of natural selection to mold not only morphology, but the behavior of the snake: the twitching of its tail so that the spider ornament appears to “walk.”  But any adaptation like this ornament must have incipient stages, and each subsequent modification must improve the adaptation—that is, it much give the snake possessing the “improved” improvement a reproductive advantage. (That advantage would derive from the better nutrition of a snake who caught more birds, and thus might have more offspring, increasing the proportion of genes for more spider-like ornaments.)

My own guess was that the ornament started with the simple twitching of the tail of an immobile snake, a twitching that might attract predators and, moreover, is already known in several snakes. After that, any mutation that modified the tail, making it look more like a spider, would give the snake a further reproductive advantage. And so we get the spider ornament, which might of course still be evolving. Concurrent with the evolution of the ornament itself would be the evolution of the snake’s tail-twitching behavior, which makes the caudal appendage resemble a spider nearly perfectly.

It turns out, of course, that I’m not the first person to think of this scenario. Discover Magazine wrote about this snake last spring, and speculated about its evolution:

“The evolution of luring is more complex than contrasting color or simple shaking — the movement is precisely adapted to duplicate prey movement frequencies, amplitudes and directions, at least in specialized cases.”It’s not uncommon for many snakes to do something similar with their tails to deceive prey. The common death adder of Australia buries itself in leaves, then writhes its tail like a worm to catch lizards and frogs. The Saharan sand viper conceals itself in sand with only its eyes and nostrils visible. When a lizard comes along, it sticks its tail out from the dirt, making it squirm like an insect larvae.  The behavior — and the elaborate body modifications that can accompany it — likely arose from a behavior common to many reptiles, Schwenk explains. When they are about to strike prey, any lizards and snakes enter a hyper-alert pose. The reptiles will focus their vision by cocking their heads to the side, arching their backs, and certain species will commonly vibrate their tail tip against the ground. This can distract the prey, which will shift its attention to the vibrating tail, ignoring the reptile mouth opening to grab them.“This simple pattern leads to selection causing refining of the tail form and motion to be more attractive to such prey by more accurately mimicking actual prey movements,” Schwenk theorizes. “The other ancestral condition that could have led to caudal luring, or possibly an intermediate step in the process, is the use of tail vibration for prey distraction rather than for luring.” Indeed, those most famous tail shakers, the rattlesnakes, sometimes also use caudal luring. For example, juvenile dusky pygmy rattlesnakes, whose rattle is so small it barely makes noise, wiggle their tails to attract prey. The behavior, in fact, may be key to how rattlesnakes evolved their distinctive rears, although this theory is somewhat controversial. “Like many other apparently simple things in biology, there is a lot of complexity to caudal luring that has barely been explored,” Schwenk says. “Much of this has been considered in a piecemeal fashion, but a thorough review and synthesis … has not been attempted.”

Now we’re not sure if this is the correct evolutionary pathway, but constructing a plausible step-by-step scenario like this, and showing that the intermediate “stages” occur as adaptations among existing species, is sufficient to refute the creationist claim that structures like the spider ornament could not have evolved and thus much have been created by God (or a “designer”, which means the same thing). The same kind of argument was used by Darwin in The Origin to refute Paley’s argument that the camera eye must have been created by God. Dawkins discusses it in the video below (and, as I recall, in his book The Blind Watchmaker).

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 10, 2020 • 7:45 am

Down in burning Australia, Tony Eales has managed to photograph some of the insects that haven’t yet been incinerated. Note that there is some mimicry as well as crypsis (camouflage) in the photos below. Tony’s notes are indented:

Today is a mish-mash of recent things that may be of interest.

Last year I photographed a female Clear-wing Persimmon Borer (Ichneumenoptera chrysophanes), a beautiful wasp-mimicking moth whose larvae bore into the stems of certain fruit trees. My first photograph of the new decade was of the male of this species. I was having friends over for a BBQ on the first of January and I was standing around talking when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something odd looking on a leaf. I announced loudly “I have to get my camera” and ran off to the office, came back and got the shot.

Next a couple of possible wasp-mimicking Stiletto flies. I say possible because the first one, Agapophytus aterrimus, certainly has some of the wasp-mimicking characteristics but also is reminiscent of some Jewel Beetles in the genus Castiarina:

Castiarina sp:

The second wasp-mimic is more straightforward. The fly Agapophytus pallidicornis is a striking mimic of the common spider-wasps in the genus Fabriogenia. In fact, when I photographed it, the only clue I had that I might be dealing with something other than a spider-wasp was that it was sitting still, whereas spider-wasp’s restless searching for prey never seems to pause for even a  second.

Fabriogenia sp.:

I finally got to photograph the Giant Bulldog Ant (Myrmecia brevinoda). It was a hulking 35mm long and not at all impressed with me. They’re a terrifying ant to play around with, they’re fast defensive and have excellent eyesight and reportedly an unbelievably painful sting. Even so I messed with this one a lot to make sure I got the shot. The only bigger ant in Australia is the queen of this species which can be over 40mm long.

I found the larvae of a species of Tortoise Leaf Beetle which I think is probably Aspidimorpha deusta. The larvae in this family are unusual for carrying around a “faecal shield” made up of excretions, poisonous chemicals from the plants they eat and shed exoskeletons. A. deusta tend to hold the shield over them like an umbrella.

From mimicry to defence to camouflage. I’ve been finding these transparent and green cockroaches on the underside of leaves in the local rainforest. They are in the genus Mediastinia and they have exoskeletons so transparent that from certain angles it simply doesn’t show up in photographs.

Also in the rainforest I found a tiny Pygmy Grasshopper in the family Tetrigidae. They’re only a couple of millimetres in length as adults and well camouflaged as  a piece of moss that they’re very easy to miss.

But of course no stings, or camouflage or mimicry can defend an insect from fungal parasites like this Ophiocordyceps that I found after having consuded what looks like some sort of Hoverfly.

On the climate apocalypse front, the fires are still raging with no real end in sight as we come to the hottest end of the traditional fire season (note these fires have been burning since September), the latest estimates are that 10 million hectares have burned leading to the loss of an estimated one billion “animals” (and you know they’re only talking about the vertebrates). While these fires and the loss of lives, homes and forests is rightly the big news, as bad as they are, the devastation from unusually warm ocean temperatures on tropical reef systems is even worse.

That story is only just coming out now but we’ll be counting the cost for decades to come. On my way to my favourite little rainforest patch I was horrified at the state of the surrounding forest. This moist eucalyptus forest looked like it had already been burned but you could see that it wasn’t. It was that every young tree was dead from drought and all the older trees had dead limbs and drooping dry foliage. This kind of forest has rare and low intensity understory burns and it protects the rainforest that it surrounds; however in these conditions one can easily imagine a fire getting into the dry crowns and wiping out everything.

All we can do is cross our fingers and wait for rains and hoping nothing sets it off beforehand.

Monday: Hili dialogue and farmyard rush hour

November 4, 2019 • 5:49 am

by Matthew Cobb

Hili has some odd culinary choices, but she is a cat after all:

Paulina: Do you like sausages with salmon?
Hili: And the ones with chicken as well, and the ones with turkey.


Paulina: Smakują ci te kiełbaski z łososiem?
Hili: Te z kurczakiem też i te z indykiem.
.
In Devises, the animals of Marsh Farm are all ready to come rushing out of the barn, into a glorious sunrise:

A Canada goose found its way onto a football pitch in Macclesfield, south of Manchester:

Academics – always complaining about the same thing:

Some absolutely gorgeous geology. It’s unsigned, but appears to have come from the workshop of Slartibartfast, I believe:

 

There are some parts of Earth where life can’t find a way. Doesn’t look good for the hypersaline water sludge that may be just beneath the surface of Mars:

Speaking of Mars:

The new BBC Natural History Unit series Seven Worlds: One Planet, narrated by David Attenborough, has got off to a flying start, although I found bits of a bit too brutal to watch (I went to do the washing up while trapped walruses tumbled and bounced off the top of a cliff). These next two tweets were the highlight of last night’s episode for me – a viper that lives in the Iranian desert which has adapted the end of its tail as a lure – it looks remarkably like a spider scuttling about, but the incredibly camouflaged snake soon puts paid to the illusion…

Readers’ wildlife photos

October 8, 2019 • 8:00 am

Tony Eales from Brisbane sent us some lovely photos of arthopods, including some great examples of mimicry and camouflage (“crypsis”). Tony’s captions are indented.

Some mimicry and a few other random arthropods.

Three shots of a wraparound spider, Dolophones sp. These are small, only about 8mm across and fairly common, but rarely seen for obvious reasons. I find them mostly in the late afternoon as they start to build their web for the night. When building the web they just look like any other small orb-weaving spider, but when they see you approaching they scurry up a silk-line to the nearest twig and virtually disappear. As you can see in the third picture, when not all folded up in camouflage pose they display quite a bit of colour.

The ones I normally see have flattened dome-shaped abdomen but I knew there were ones out there with these weird turrets on their backs and had been wanting to photograph one for ages. Evolution is weird.

Next is a Hangingfly Harpobittacus sp. Hangingflies are in a separate order of insects Mercoptera along with Scorpionflies. We don’t have a lot of species diversity in this family in Australia but do have a lot of diversity at higher levels, with two families being endemic. Hangingflies are famous for their elaborate mating rituals in which the male captures prey to present to the females. I hope to observe this one day.

This female Clear-wing Persimmon Borer moth (Ichneumenoptera chrysophanes) is so far the find of the season for me. I have never seen such a striking wasp-mimicking moth.

The model is probably something like this Ichneumenon wasp Xanthopimpla sp.

And lastly just a little cutie. A very tiny Sandalodes sp. jumping spider with a tiny katydid nymph as prey. [JAC: Doesn’t it look excited?}

Spot the insect, from Piotr Naskrecki

August 10, 2019 • 12:00 pm

Here are two lovely photos of a mimic taken by photographer/biologist/naturalist Piotr Naskrecki in Gorongosa Park in Mozambique. These appeared on his Facebook page, and I asked for permission to reproduce them. I give his captions below. I’ve also turned this into a “spot the. . .” quiz for those who want a not-too-hard puzzle. The reveal is below the fold.

Piotr’s captions are indented.

Every now and then somebody posts a similar photo so, now is my turn. It is not a difficult one and you will get an extra point for naming the family of the subject. I ran across it today on the Cheringoma Plateau in Gorongosa.

Click below to see the critter:

Continue reading “Spot the insect, from Piotr Naskrecki” →