Masquerading organisms appear to closely resemble inedible and generally inanimate objects, such as twigs, leaves, stones, and bird droppings. It has recently been demonstrated that masquerading prey gain protection from predation by being misclassified as inedible objects by their predators....

Aposematic insects conspicuously advertise their unprofitability to potential predators. However, when these prey initially evolved, they were likely to have been rare and presumably at a greater risk of being detected and killed by naive predators. Both kin and individual selection theories...

How insect defense chemicals have evolved has remained relatively understudied, compared with the evolution of aposematic signals of such defenses. Because there is mounting evidence that chemical defenses can generally be expected to be costly, understanding the evolution of such defenses and...

Müllerian mimicry, where 2 unpalatable species share a warning pattern, is classically believed to be a form of mutualism, where the species involved share the cost of predator education. Birds learn to avoid a color signal faster when individual prey possesses 1 of 2 bitter-tasting chemicals...

Many prey organisms avoid predation by mimicking inanimate objects: a phenomenon known as masquerade. It is expected that masquerade will show a frequency-dependent advantage such that masquerading species benefit more from their appearance when they are rare in comparison with their models. In...