ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2018
Toxicity and taste: unequal chemical defences in a mimicry ring.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Meta-analytic evidence for quantitative honesty in aposematic signals.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Pooled it
- Diel activity correlates with colour pattern morphology of heterobranch sea slugs.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Tracing the evolution of key traits in dorid nudibranchs.PloS one · 2025Article
- Article
- Chemical defences indicate bold colour patterns with reduced variability in aposematic nudibranchs.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Cardenolides in the defensive fluid of adult large milkweed bugs have differential potency on vertebrate and invertebrate predator NaRoyal Society open science · 2024Article
- Signal detectability and boldness are not the same: the function of defensive coloration in nudibranchs is distance-dependent.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Article
- Expanding the Repertoire of Spongian-16-One Derivatives in Australian Nudibranchs of the GenusMarine drugs · 2021Article
- The Validity of Brine Shrimp (Artemia Sp.) Toxicity Assays to Assess the Ecological Function of Marine Natural Products.Journal of chemical ecology · 2021Article
- Evolutionary and ecological processes influencing chemical defense variation in an aposematic and mimeticPeerJ · 2021Article
- Mimicry and mitonuclear discordance in nudibranchs: New insights from exon capture phylogenomics.Ecology and evolution · 2020Article
- Toxicity and Alkaloid Profiling of the Skin of the Golfo Dulcean Poison Frog Phyllobates vittatus (Dendrobatidae).Journal of chemical ecology · 2019Article
- Weak warning signals can persist in the absence of gene flow.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- No evidence of quantitative signal honesty across species of aposematic burnet moths (Lepidoptera: Zygaenidae).Journal of evolutionary biology · 2019Article
- Highly defended nudibranchs "escape" to visually distinct background habitats.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
- Defense against predators incurs high reproductive costs for the aposematic mothBehavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mimicry of warning signals is common, and can be mutualistic when mimetic species harbour equal levels of defence (Müllerian), or parasitic when mimics are undefended but still gain protection from their resemblance to the model (Batesian). However, whether chemically defended mimics should be similar in terms of toxicity (i.e. causing damage to the consumer) and/or unpalatability (i.e. distasteful to consumer) is unclear and in many studies remains undifferentiated. In this study, we investigated the evolution of visual signals and chemical defences in a putative mimicry ring of nudibranch molluscs. First, we demonstrated that the appearance of a group of red spotted nudibranchs molluscs was similar from the perspective of potential fish predators using visual modelling and pattern analysis. Second, using phylogenetic reconstruction, we demonstrated that this colour pattern has evolved multiple times in distantly related individuals. Third, we showed that these nudibranchs contained different chemical profiles used for defensive purposes. Finally, we demonstrated that although levels of distastefulness towards Palaemon shrimp remained relatively constant between species, toxicity levels towards brine shrimp varied significantly. We highlight the need to disentangle toxicity and taste when considering chemical defences in aposematic and mimetic species, and discuss the implications for aposematic and mimicry signal evolution.
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