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The Great Imposters
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| Term Paper Title | The Great Imposters |
| # of Words | 1263 |
| # of Pages (250 words per page double spaced) | 5.05 |
The Great Imposters
Finding good day
care can certainly pose a problem these days,
unless, of course, you're an African widow bird.
When it comes time for a female widow bird to lay
her eggs, she simply locates the nest of a nearby
Estrildid finch and surreptitiously drops the eggs
inside. That's the last the widow bird ever sees of
her offspring. But not to worry, because the
Estrildid finch will take devoted care of the
abandoned birds as if they were her own. And
who's to tell the difference? Though adult widow
birds and Estrildid finches don't look at all alike,
their eggs do. Not only that, baby widow birds are
dead ringers for Estrildid finch chicks, both having
the same colouration and markings. They even act
and sound the same, thus ensuring that the widow
bird nestlings can grow up among their alien
nestmates with no risk of being rejected by their
foster parents. MASTERS OF DISGUISE Things
aren't always as they seem, and nowhere is this
more true than in nature, where dozens of animals
(and plants) spend their time masquerading as
others. So clever are their disguises that you've
probably never known you were being fooled by
spiders impersonating ants, squirrels that look like
shrews, worms copying sea anemones, and
roaches imitating ladybugs. There are even animals
that look like themselves, which can also be a
form of impersonation. The phenomenon of
mimicry, as it's called by biologists, was first noted
in the mid-1800s by an English naturalist, Henry
W. Bates. Watching butterflies in the forests of
Brazil, Bates discovered that many members of
the Peridae butterfly family did not look anything
like their closest relatives. Instead they bore a
striking resemblance to members of the
Heliconiidae butterfly family. Upon closer
inspection, Bates found that there was a major
advantage in mimicking the Heliconiids. Fragile,
slow-moving and brightly coloured, the Heliconiids
are ideal targets for insectivorous birds. Yet, birds
never touch them because they taste so bad.
Imagine that you're a delicious morsel of butterfly.
Wouldn't it be smart to mimic the appearance of
an unpalatable Heliconiid so that no bird would
bother you either? That's what Bates concluded
was happening in the Brazilian jungle among the
Pieridae. Today, the imitation of an inedible
species by an edible one is called Batesian
mimicry. Since Bates' time, scientists have
unmasked hundreds of cases of mimicry in nature.
It hasn't always been an easy job, either, as when
an animal
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