Batesion Theory Essay

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Jessica Kent 06/13/12 CTW 2 Batesion mimicking is named after the English naturalist Henry Walter Bates. Batesion mimicking is known as the mechanism that prey uses as a form of protection. They mimic detested species that are similar to them in size, shape, and appearance. Those unplatable species often contain toxic chemicals that predators despise, so they avoid the mimics when hunting for prey. If the flies in question ended up in a place where there were no predators at all, my prediction would be that they all remained the same color and developed and reproduced abundantly. Predators would have caused the most “attractive” flies to diminish within the population due to the fact that they had no protection against them. The only flies that would have been left are the flies selected by natural selection, the flies that were able to survive and reproduce. Those would have been the flies that were less “attractive” and blended in with some other sort of means of protection. My prediction for the color of the flies that were able to mimic in the presence of predators would be that it also stayed the same. As long as the flies were protected by the models, they were less to be attacked by the predators, leaving them to reproduce and pass on their genes to the next generation. It seems that evolution plays a huge part in the theory of Batesian mimicking. The greater opportunity the mimic has impersonate the model specie, the greater chance it has for survival and procreation, therefore increasing its fitness in the environment.
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