ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2017
The perfection of mimicry: an information approach.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Birds select for higher mimetic accuracy, but imperfect mimics benefit from chromatic resemblance to their models.Current zoology · 2026Article
- AreCurrent zoology · 2026Article
- Batesian Mimicry Converges toward Inaccuracy in Myrmecomorphic Spiders.Systematic biology · 2025Article
- Evolutionary arms race in ant-ant mimicry: Camponotus lateralis lags behind in mimicking color patterns and sizes of regional Crematogaster models.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Molecular mimicry: ecology, evolution, and applications of doppelgänger peptides.Trends in biochemical sciences · 2025Review
- Is temporal synchrony necessary for effective Batesian mimicry?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Small Brains: Body Shape Constrains Tissue Allocation to the Central Nervous System in Ant-Mimicking Spiders.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2024Article
- Combined measures of mimetic fidelity explain imperfect mimicry in a brood parasite-host system.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Sexually dimorphic dorsal coloration in a jumping spider: testing a potential case of sex-specific mimicry.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Mimicry in motion and morphology: do information limitation, trade-offs or compensation relax selection for mimetic accuracy?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Batesian mimicry in the nonrewarding saprophytic orchidEcology and evolution · 2021Article
- Field evidence for colour mimicry overshadowing morphological mimicry.The Journal of animal ecology · 2021Article
- Perfect mimicry betweenProceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Sensory bias and signal detection trade-offs maintain intersexual floral mimicry.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Unsupervised machine learning reveals mimicry complexes in bumblebees occur along a perceptual continuum.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Article
- Diversity in warning coloration: selective paradox or the norm?Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2019Review
- Persistence of multiple patterns and intraspecific polymorphism in multi-species Müllerian communities of net-winged beetles.Frontiers in zoology · 2019Article
- How cognitive biases select for imperfect mimicry: a study of asymmetry in learning with bumblebees.Animal behaviour · 2018Article
- Frequency dependence shapes the adaptive landscape of imperfect Batesian mimicry.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We consider why imperfect deceptive mimics can persist when it appears to be in the predator's interest to discriminate finely between mimics and their models. One theory is that a receiver will accept being duped if the model and mimic overlap in appearance and the relative costs of attacking the model are high. However, a more fundamental explanation for the difficulty of discrimination is not based on perceptual uncertainty, but simply based on a lack of information. In particular, predators in the process of learning may cease sampling imperfect mimics entirely because the immediate pay-off and future value of information is low, allowing such mimics to persist. This outcome will be particularly likely when the model is relatively costly to attack and/or the discriminative rules the predator has to learn are complex. Information limitations neatly explain why predators tend to adopt discriminative rules based on single traits (such as stripe colour), rather than on combinations of traits (such as stripe order). They also explain why predators utilize certain salient discriminative traits while ignoring equally informative ones (a phenomenon known as overshadowing), and why imperfect mimics may be more common in phenotypically diverse prey communities.This article is part of the themed issue 'Animal coloration: production, perception, function and application'.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.