Props to my brother (the Dave) for titling this week's strip.
This was one of the easier ones to draw – or at least more enjoyable, so it seemed easy. I loved making the butterfly. Butterflies always follow me around the park. :)
Just fyi…
Batesian mimicry is when a non-dangerous/non-poisonous species has coloration that mimics a dangerous one. The reason is that a predator, having encountered a dangerous doppelganger, will leave the mimic alone. I found a mimic like this at the park. A moth that resembled a bee! That creature was the inspiration for this week's strip. This is the case for the king snake too.
A Viceroy is a Müllerian mimic. In this type of mimicry, the similar species also share similar characteristics. Bees and hornets of various species are this kind of mimic because all are black and yellow and all have stings. If a predator encounters one, he avoids them all.
A third type is Emsleyan or Mertensian mimicry, which is the case of a deadly animal mimicking a less harmful one. In this instance, it is because a predator would die from an encounter with the deadly species and therefore not learn pattern recognition, but when it encounters the harmful but not deadly one, it learns aversion. While milk snakes and king snakes mimic a more harmful species, the deadly coral snake actually mimics a less harmful species. The trendsetters for these tri-colored critters are the false coral snakes.
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