Most research on aposematism has focused on chemically defended prey, but the signalling difficulty of capture remains poorly explored. Similar to classical Batesian and Müllerian mimicry related to distastefulness, such 'evasive aposematism' may also lead to convergence in warning colours, known as evasive mimicry. A prime candidate group for evasive mimicry are Adelpha butterflies, which are agile insects and show remarkable colour pattern convergence. We tested the ability of naive blue tits to learn to avoid and generalize Adelpha wing patterns associated with the difficulty of capture and compared their response to that of birds that learned to associate the same wing patterns with distastefulness. Birds learned to avoid all wing patterns tested and generalized their aversion to other prey to some extent, but learning was faster with evasive prey compared to distasteful prey. Our results on generalization agree with longstanding observations of striking convergence in wing colour patterns among Adelpha species, since, in our experiments, perfect mimics of evasive and distasteful models were always protected during generalization and suffered the lowest attack rate. Moreover, generalization on evasive prey was broader compared to that on distasteful prey. Our results suggest that being hard to catch may deter predators at least as effectively as distastefulness. This study provides empirical evidence for evasive mimicry, a potentially widespread but poorly understood form of morphological convergence driven by predator selection.

Biology Centre CAS Institute of Entomology Branišovská 31 České Budějovice Czech Republic

Department of Biological and Environmental Science University of Jyväskylä Finland

Institut de Systématique Evolution Biodiversité Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle CNRS SU EPHE UA Paris France

McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity Florida Museum of Natural History University of Florida Gainesville USA

Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Research Program Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences University of Helsinki Finland

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Quantifying the success of prey crypsis, aposematism, and evasiveness in avoiding predator attack

Hard to catch: experimental evidence supports evasive mimicry

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10.5061/dryad.vq83bk3rj

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