Table 1.
Attack instruction sequence targeting.
Figure 1.
Predators evolve to recognize and avoid consuming poisonous prey and poison-signaling mimics, even at relatively low poison efficacy levels.
Data shown represent a fit from a logistic regression model relating poison level to the probability that predators will evolve to avoid consuming poisonous prey (based on proportion of evolved populations in which poison prey were no longer under predation pressure). Solid black line indicates the predicted probability. The red dashed lines represent the 95% bootstrap confidence intervals of the model. Circles indicate the observed values in our experiments.
Figure 2.
Predators benefit from evolving to distinguish and preferentially avoid poisonous prey at higher poison efficacy levels.
Shown are mean population sizes for the three prey classes; non-poisonous (blue), poisonous (pink), and mimics (orange), as well as predator abundance (grey) at four of the tested poison levels, 0.1 (a), 0.2 (b), 0.3 (c), and 0.4 (d). Shaded regions show the 95% bootstrap confidence intervals calculated from 10,000 iterations.
Figure 3.
Prey preferentially mimic poisonous prey under conditions of high poison efficacy and associated evolved predator selectivity.
Shown are proportion of mimic class organisms presenting phenotypes representing each available prey class: mimic (orange), non-poisonous (blue), and poisonous (pink) at four tested poison levels, 0.1 (a), 0.2 (b), 0.3 (c), and 0.4 (d). Shaded regions show the 95% bootstrap confidence intervals calculated from 10,000 iterations.
Figure 4.
Moderate and high poison efficacy levels promote the evolution of mimicry, even when mimicry is highly imperfect.
Shown are mean ratios of the mean proportion of organisms in each population that were mimicking poisonous prey under low accuracy mimicry conditions (10%) to the mean proportion mimicking poisonous prey when mimicry was perfect (100% accuracy). At low poison levels, a lower proportion of organisms in the mimic class mimic poison prey when mimicry is imperfect. CI's given are 95% bootstrapped confidence intervals. Bootstrapping was performed by repeatedly calculating the ratio from sampled subsets of the source populations (i.e. 10% and 100% accuracy populations) at 500,000 updates.