Warning colouration

Encyclopedia : W : WA : WAR : Warning colouration

The brightly coloured markings of an animal designed to be a guard against ingestion by another, or aggression toward the animal.

This can be seen in insects such as the Wasp (Black and Yellow stripes) and Bee (also Black and Yellow). Reptiles such as the Coral Snake (Red, Yellow and Black).

As can be seen, the major Warning Colours seem to be Black and Yellow, giving a universal 'danger' signal to most animals (this depends on colour vision of course)

However, some non-dangerous animals use the Warning Colouration to avoid being eaten by predators, an excellent example of this is the Hoverfly which has no sting. Here we come on to the subject of mimicry. The peacock butterfly has eye-spots on its wings, which, when opened, look remarkably like the eyes of an owl, startling the predator which was going to eat the butterfly. Also, the corn snake partially mimics the colouration of the coral snake mentioned previously.

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.