BIO

Throughout nature, a silent war is waged between predators and prey, the former attacking and the latter defending themselves. Adversaries often employ the same strategy: Mimicry.

Rule-footed natural selection eliminates species whose evolution is not rapid or adequate. The diversity of methods developed over billions of years in the animal world to deceive adversaries is astonishing. Changes in color and the specific arrangement of spots are among the most common defensive tactics. Some animals employ a phenomenon called homochromy (same color): they are thus able to blend in with their surroundings, making them difficult to detect.

Mimicry is an adaptive strategy of imitation. It allows, for example, a species to escape potential predators or to deceive its prey. Mimetic strategies are of various types, such as species that possess means of escaping the predator’s sight—this is known as camouflage or cryptic mimicry—or the act of impersonating another species, for example, by adopting the attributes of inedible or even dangerous species. However, mimicry can also serve other purposes, such as reproduction or predation (as in the case of the devourer blenny).

There is a major difference between mimicry and camouflage from an evolutionary perspective: while the ability to camouflage, particularly through color, can appear and develop very rapidly within a species through mutations and selection, mimicry, on the contrary, involves a complex co-evolutionary mechanism involving three species: the “model” species, the imitating species, and the deceived species.

François Zylberman