Deep in the Amazon rainforest, biologists have discovered a bird that disguises its young as poisonous caterpillars.
The bird, known as the “cinereous mourner”, hatches from an egg covered with orange feathers and white tips like the poisonous local caterpillars.
The baby even acts like a caterpillar, and will not break its shape unless its parents give it a specific call, apparently a bird of prey “clearly.” This is a wild example of a survival strategy called Batesian mimicry, where a harmless animal mimics something dangerous to avoid predation.
This is the first known example of a bird mimicking an insect, but mimicry in the animal world can be much more interesting – and more subtle.
Amazonian birds are amazing, but when it comes to skullduggery nothing can hold a candle to the orchid mantis.
It has long been assumed that this unusual appearance was to deceive and exploit potential pollinators, and in a 2014 paper in the journal American Naturalist, James O’Hanlon and his colleagues confirmed it.
Through careful observation, O’Hanlon and his colleagues confirmed that the ladybug has indeed succeeded in tricking its prey into believing that it is a flower just waiting to be pollinated.
In a more sophisticated deception, the mantis keeps itself away from other flowers, to avoid competition from the real one.
In this way, ladybugs attract—and eat, of course—more pollinators than actual orchids!
This type of mimicry, where a predator imitates an innocuous object, is often referred to as aggressive mimicry.
This octopus has been known to mimic flatfish, lionfish, sea snakes, jellyfish, and sometimes coconuts.
This ability to imitate many forms, called polymorphic mimicry, is very common.
Many species, like the newly discovered birds, are limited to imitating only one other species, and generally that is enough to fulfill the goal of survival.