The idea of predator-prey arms races is of course entirely inconsistent with the childish notion of intelligent design, because constantly designing solutions to problems you created earlier as solutions to even earlier problems you created, is not an act of intelligence.
And yet creationists continue to believe in intelligent [sic] design despite the abundance of these competitive arms races in the natural world.
It seems they have no difficulty in holding several pairs of mutually contradictory views of their putative designer god simultaneously. It is supremely intelligent and acts in ways that can only be described as supremely stupid.
It is omnibenevolent but designs ways to increase the suffering in the world with its parasites; it is omnipotent but powerless against another supernatural designer called 'sin'; and by the way, it is the only supernatural entity capable of designing living thing, so 'evidence' of design (i.e. something a creationist can't understand how it could have evolved) is proof of its existence.
But in the real world, these evolutionary arms races, which are exactly what the mindless, aimless Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection predicts, produce some of the most fascinating results which are incomprehensible in terms of the product of an intelligent design process. These are the very many examples of cryptic camouflage, warning coloration and Batesian mimicry.
Tell me about Batesian mimicry with examples, please. Batesian mimicry is a form of mimicry where a harmless species evolves to imitate the warning signals of a harmful or unpalatable species to deter predators. This form of mimicry was named after the British naturalist Henry Walter Bates, who studied butterflies in the Amazon rainforest in the mid-19th century. The mimicry works because predators mistake the harmless species (the mimic) for the harmful one (the model), avoiding both.Batesian mimicry is normally thought of as a visual display, depending for its effect on the visual perception of the predator, but there is another, less obvious form that depends not on sight, but on hearing, where the mimic makes a sound that the potential predator mistakes for that of a toxic or harmful prey species, and just such an example was found recently by researchers at the Florida University's Museum of Natural History.
Examples of Batesian MimicryMechanism and Evolution
- Viceroy and Monarch Butterflies
- Model: Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus) – These butterflies are toxic and unpalatable due to the milkweed they consume as larvae.
- Mimic: Viceroy Butterfly (Limenitis archippus) – Though not as toxic as the Monarch, the Viceroy closely resembles the Monarch in color and pattern, thus gaining protection from predators.
- Hoverflies and Wasps/Bees
- Model: Wasps and Bees – These insects are often brightly colored with black and yellow stripes and possess painful stings.
- Mimic: Hoverflies (Family Syrphidae) – Hoverflies mimic the appearance of wasps and bees, including their coloration and sometimes their behavior, despite being harmless and stingless.
- Scarlet King Snake and Coral Snake
- Model: Coral Snake (Micrurus spp.) – These snakes have potent venom and are brightly colored with distinctive red, yellow/white, and black banding.
- Mimic: Scarlet King Snake (Lampropeltis elapsoides) – This non-venomous snake has a similar color pattern to the Coral Snake, which helps deter predators.
- Owl Butterflies and Owls
- Model: Owls – Large predatory birds with big eyes.
- Mimic: Owl Butterflies (Caligo spp.) – These butterflies have large eye spots on their wings that resemble the eyes of an owl, potentially deterring predators who might think they are being watched by a larger animal.
- False Cleanerfish and Cleaner Wrasse
- Model: Cleaner Wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) – These small fish provide a cleaning service to other fish by eating parasites off their bodies.
- Mimic: False Cleanerfish (Aspidontus taeniatus) – This fish mimics the appearance and behavior of the Cleaner Wrasse but instead bites the fish it approaches, taking a chunk of flesh.
Batesian mimicry relies on the presence of a predator that can learn to avoid harmful species. When the mimic's population is much smaller than the model's, the mimicry is most effective because predators are more likely to have had negative experiences with the harmful model and thus avoid the mimic as well. If mimics become too numerous, the predator might start to ignore the warning signals, reducing the effectiveness of the mimicry.
Ecological and Evolutionary Implications
Batesian mimicry can drive complex evolutionary dynamics between species. Predators, models, and mimics are engaged in an ongoing evolutionary arms race. Mimics must evolve to closely resemble models, models might evolve to change their warning signals, and predators must continuously learn to distinguish between harmful and harmless species. Overall, Batesian mimicry is a fascinating example of evolutionary adaptation, showcasing the intricate interactions between species in nature.
This involves a beetle - the potential prey of bats - which has evolved to mimic the warning ultrasonic sound signal a tiger moth produces when it hears bat echolocation sounds. Although tiger beetles are themselves noxious to other potential predator species because they produce benzaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide, experiments have shown that this isn't sufficient in itself to deter bats, so their responses are not warning of the beetles’ noxiousness. Further experiments showed they are mimicking the responses of the tiger moth.
The arms race between moths and bats is itself an interesting background to both bat and moth evolution but is inexplicable as the result of intelligent design, as I explain in my popular, illustrated book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax.
The team have published their findings, open access, in the Royal Society journal, Biology Letters, and explain it in a Florida Museum news item:
Bats, as the main predator of night-flying insects, create a selective pressure that has led many of their prey to evolve an early warning system of sorts: ears uniquely tuned to high-frequency bat echolocation. To date, scientists have found at least six orders of insects – including moths, beetles, crickets and grasshoppers – that have evolved ears capable of detecting ultrasound.
But tiger beetles take things a step further. When they hear a bat nearby, they respond with their own ultrasonic signal, and for the past 30 years, no one has known why.
While doing his doctoral research at the Florida Museum of Natural History, [Harlan M Gough] reasoned that tiger beetles must receive a major benefit from making the sound, since it would also help bats locate them.It’s such a foreign idea to humans: these animals flying around at night trying to catch each other in essentially complete darkness, using sound as their way of communicating.
Harlan M. Gough, lead author
McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity
Florida Museum of Natural History
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
Tiger beetles are the only group of beetle scientists know of that seem to produce ultrasound in response to bat predation. An estimated 20% of moth species, however, are known to have this ability and provide a helpful reference for understanding the behavior in other insects.
This was a really fun study because we got to peel apart the story layer by layer.
Harlan M. Gough.
The researchers began by confirming that tiger beetles produced ultrasound in response to bat predation. As bats fly through the night sky, they periodically send out ultrasonic pulses, which gives them snapshots of their surroundings. When a bat has located potential prey, they start clicking more frequently, allowing them to lock on to their targets.
This also creates a distinctive bat echolocation attack sequence, which researchers played for tiger beetles to see how they would respond. When a beetle flies, its hard shell opens to reveal two hindwings that generate lift. The elytra, which formerly covered the wings, are protective and don’t help with flight. These are typically held up and out of the way.
The researchers spent two summers in the deserts of southern Arizona and collected 20 different tiger beetle species to study. Of these, seven responded to bat attack sequences by swinging their elytra slightly toward the back. This caused the beating hind wings to strike the back edges of the elytra, like the two wing pairs were clapping. To a human’s ears it sounds like a faint buzzing, but a bat would pick up the higher frequencies and hear the beetle loud and clear.
Responding to bat echolocation is a much less common ability than just being able to hear echolocation. Most moths aren’t singing these sounds through their mouths, like we think of bats echolocating through their mouth and nose. Tiger moths, for example, use a specialized structure on the side of the body, so you need that structure to make ultrasound as well as ears to hear the bat.
Harlan M. Gough.
Tiger beetles were certainly responding to the sound of a bat attack with ultrasound. But why?
Some moths can jam bat sonar by producing several clicks in close, quick succession. The researchers quickly ruled out this possibility for tiger beetles, however, as they produce ultrasound that is too simple for such a feat.
Instead, they suspected that tiger beetles, which produce benzaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide as defensive chemicals, were using ultrasound to warn bats that they are noxious — like many moths do.
These defensive compounds have been shown to be effective against some insect predators. Some tiger beetles, when you hold them in your hand, you can actually smell some of those compounds that they are producing.
Harlan M. Gough.
They tested their theory by feeding 94 tiger beetles to big brown bats, which eat a wide array of insects but show a strong preference for beetles. To their surprise, 90 were completely eaten while two were only partially consumed, and just two were rejected, indicating that the beetles’ defensive chemicals do little to dissuade big brown bats.
According to Akito Kawahara, director of the museum’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, this was the first time scientists had tested whether tiger beetles were actually noxious to bats.
It turned out tiger beetles don’t use ultrasound to warn bats of their noxiousness. But there was one last possibility. Some moths produce anti-bat ultrasound even though they are palatable. Scientists believe these moths are trying to trick bats by acoustically mimicking the ultrasonic signals of genuinely noxious moth species.Even if you identify a chemical, that doesn’t mean it’s a defense against a particular predator. You don’t actually know until you do the experiment with the predator.
Akito Y. Kawahara, co-author
McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity
Florida Museum of Natural History
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
Could tiger beetles be doing something similar? The researchers compared recordings of tiger beetle ultrasound, collected earlier in the study, with recordings of tiger moths already in their database. Upon analyzing the ultrasonic signals, they found a clear overlap and the answer to their question.
Tiger beetles, which do not have chemical defenses against bats, produce ultrasound to mimic tiger moths, which are noxious to bats.
But this behavior is limited to tiger beetles that fly at night. Some of the 2,000 species of tiger beetles are active exclusively during the day, using their vision to chase and hunt smaller insects, and don’t have the selective pressure of bat predation. The 12 diurnal tiger beetle species that the researchers included in the study are evidence of this.
Tiger beetles are fierce predators, running quickly after smaller insects and crushing them with their large mandibles.Photo: Geena Hill.
If you get one of those tiger beetles that goes to sleep at night and play bat echolocation to it, it makes no response at all. And they seem to be able to pretty quickly lose the ability to be afraid of bat echolocation.
Harlan M. Gough.
Researchers suspect there may be even more undiscovered examples of ultrasonic mimicry, given how understudied the acoustics of the night sky are.These delicate ecological interactions are also at risk of being disrupted soon. Acoustic mimicry needs a quiet environment to work, but human impacts like noise and light pollution are already altering what the night sky looks and sounds like.I think it’s happening all over the world. With my colleague, Jesse Barber, we have been studying this together for many years. We think it’s not just tiger beetles and moths. It appears to be happening with all kinds of different nocturnal insects, and we just don’t know simply because we haven’t been testing in this manner.
Akito Y. Kawahara.The authors published their study in the journal Biology Letters. Juliette Rubin, former graduate student at the University of Florida and Jesse Barber of Boise State University were also authors on the study.If we want to understand these processes, we need to do it now. There are amazing processes taking place in our backyards that we can’t see. But by making our world louder, brighter and changing the temperature, these balances can break.
Akito Y. Kawahara.
AbstractEvolutionary arms races are a predictable and rational result of a mindless evolutionary process, proceeding without a plan, and go a long way to explaining very many aspects of biology and biodiversity such as these sorts of mimicry and morphological convergence, but I have yet to see a rational explanation for them in terms of intelligent [sic] design, which doesn't make creationism's putative designer look like an amnesiac idiot.
Echolocating bats and their eared insect prey are in an acoustic evolutionary war. Moths produce anti-bat sounds that startle bat predators, signal noxiousness, mimic unpalatable models and jam bat sonar. Tiger beetles (Cicindelidae) also purportedly produce ultrasound in response to bat attacks. Here we tested 19 tiger beetle species from seven genera and showed that they produce anti-bat signals to playback of authentic bat echolocation. The dominant frequency of beetle sounds substantially overlaps the sonar calls of sympatric bats. As tiger beetles are known to produce defensive chemicals such as benzaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide, we hypothesized that tiger beetle sounds are acoustically advertising their unpalatability. We presented captive big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) with seven different tiger beetle species and found that 90 out of 94 beetles were completely consumed, indicating that these tiger beetle species are not aposematically signalling. Instead, we show that the primary temporal and spectral characteristics of beetle warning sounds overlap with sympatric unpalatable tiger moth (Arctinae) sounds and that tiger beetles are probably Batesian mimics of noxious moth models. We predict that many insect taxa produce anti-bat sounds and that the acoustic mimicry rings of the night sky are hyperdiverse.
1. Introduction
Insects that fly at night must defend against echolocating bats. This intense selective pressure has helped refine ultrasonically sensitive ears [1], auditory sensors that are capable of providing advance warnings of bat sonar attacks [2]. Bat-detecting ears are found in at least seven orders of insects (Orthoptera, Mantodea, Hemiptera, Coleoptera, Neuroptera, Lepidoptera and Diptera; [3]). In response to hearing the sonar cries of hunting bats, these insects commonly flee or initiate evasive manoeuvers [4,5]. Many moth species take this acoustic battle a step further and produce ultrasonic clicks in response to bat attacks that can startle bat predators [6], signal noxiousness [4], mimic unpalatable models, [7] and jam bat sonar [8]. A recent study revealed that anti-bat ultrasound production is widespread across the lepidopteran phylogeny and around the globe [9]. There are more than 10 independent origins of ultrasound production and Barber et al. [9] estimated that perhaps 20% of large-bodied moths (Macroheterocera) produce ultrasound in response to bat sonar attack with the primary function of advertising noxiousness (aposematism) and mimicking unpalatable models.
Several species of tiger beetles (Cicindelidae) in the tribe Cicindelini possess ultrasonically sensitive ears and purportedly produce ultrasound in response to bat attacks [10]. Yager & Spangler [11] showed that some tiger beetles emit ultrasonic clicks as part of a motoric behavioural response when queried with synthetic pulses (40 kHz tones at 100 ms intervals) intended to mimic sonar attack. Upon hearing ultrasound, tiger beetles swing their elytra backwards contacting the leading edge of their beating hindwings producing ultrasonic clicks in time with their wingbeat frequency. These researchers hypothesized that this acoustic response functions as an aposematic warning of chemical protection [11].
Defensive chemicals that tiger beetles produce include benzaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide [12,13]. Benzaldehyde is the most widely studied compound produced by tiger beetles and is known from 13 genera, while hydrogen cyanide has been found in two [14,15]. Using a reduced paradigm, chicks (Gallus gallus domesticus) have been shown to reject prey coated with benzaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide [16]. Other work using model tiger beetles has demonstrated that the conspicuous orange abdomens of some beetles, in conjunction with benzaldehyde chemical protection, can reduce the frequency of attacks by robber flies (Asilidae) [17]. We propose that just as bright orange colouring warns visual predators of chemical defence, tiger beetle ultrasonic clicks may be a warning to acoustically specialized bat predators.
Here, we test key hypotheses to understand tiger beetle ultrasound production in the context of bat predation. Authentic echolocation attack sequences have, to our knowledge, never been played back to tiger beetles, yet we hypothesized that beetles would respond to this genuine predatory stimulus with an acoustic response. Furthermore, we predicted that tiger beetles would answer sonar playback with ultrasonic clicks between 30 and 60 kHz, overlapping the most common frequencies used in bat sonar [2]. We hypothesized that tiger beetles are sending an aposematic message to bats and tested the prediction that tiger beetles are unpalatable to these predators. Because we hypothesized tiger beetles are part of a mimicry complex with sound-producing moths, we predicted that the primary temporal and spectral characteristics of tiger beetle warning sounds overlap with sympatric unpalatable tiger moth sounds (Arctinae). Tiger beetles and tiger moths may provide an example of widespread cross-order acoustic mimicry.
Figure 1. Tiger beetles produce anti-bat ultrasound. (a) Spectrogram of a played-back echolocation attack with ultrasonic response produced by a tethered Ellipsoptera marutha. (b) Percentages indicate palatability to big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus; see §2). Numbers in parenthesis are sample sizes for palatability trials. (c) Principal component analysis (PCA) plot of tiger beetle sounds and sympatric chemically defended tiger moth sounds. Tiger beetle sounds are nested within the acoustic space of tiger moth warning signals. The following species are associated with the numbered points on the PCA: 1, Bertholdia trigona; 2, Carales arizonensis; 3, Cisthene tenufaschia; 4, Cisthene martini; 5, Pygarctia rosciapitis; 6, Euchates antica; 7, Ctenucha venosa; 8, Ellipsoptera marutha; 9, Brasiella wickhami; 10, Eunota fuigoris; 11, Jundlandia lemniscata; 12, Cicindelidia sedecimpunctata; 13, Cicindelidia ocelata. See §3 for details.
Gough Harlan M., Rubin Juliette J., Kawahara Akito Y. and Barber Jesse R. 2024
Tiger beetles produce anti-bat ultrasound and are probable Batesian moth mimics
Biol. Lett.2020230610 http://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2023.0610
Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by The Royal Society. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
I wonder if I will this time.
The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax
ID is not a problem for science; rather science is a problem for ID. This book shows why. It exposes the fallacy of Intelligent Design by showing that, when examined in detail, biological systems are anything but intelligently designed. They show no signs of a plan and are quite ludicrously complex for whatever can be described as a purpose. The Intelligent Design movement relies on almost total ignorance of biological science and seemingly limitless credulity in its target marks. Its only real appeal appears to be to those who find science too difficult or too much trouble to learn yet want their opinions to be regarded as at least as important as those of scientists and experts in their fields.
Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle
The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is Not Good
This book presents the reader with multiple examples of why, even if we accept Creationism's putative intelligent designer, any such entity can only be regarded as malevolent, designing ever-more ingenious ways to make life difficult for living things, including humans, for no other reason than the sheer pleasure of doing so. This putative creator has also given other creatures much better things like immune systems, eyesight and ability to regenerate limbs that it could have given to all its creation, including humans, but chose not to. This book will leave creationists with the dilemma of explaining why evolution by natural selection is the only plausible explanation for so many nasty little parasites that doesn't leave their creator looking like an ingenious, sadistic, misanthropic, malevolence finding ever more ways to increase pain and suffering in the world, and not the omnibenevolent, maximally good god that Creationists of all Abrahamic religions believe created everything. As with a previous book by this author, "The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax", this book comprehensively refutes any notion of intelligent design by anything resembling a loving, intelligent and maximally good god. Such evil could not exist in a universe created by such a god. Evil exists, therefore a maximally good, all-knowing, all-loving god does not.
Illustrated by Catherine Webber-Hounslow.
Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle
Illustrated by Catherine Webber-Hounslow.
No comments :
Post a Comment
Obscene, threatening or obnoxious messages, preaching, abuse and spam will be removed, as will anything by known Internet trolls and stalkers, by known sock-puppet accounts and anything not connected with the post,
A claim made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Remember: your opinion is not an established fact unless corroborated.