Current Events > why exactly do animals avoid eating animals that are brightly colored?

(+) Yeah! (+)

They're generally the poisonous ones

No biology expert but it seems like camouflage would be very necessary if you tasted pretty good.

what the fuck am I looking at

I was just thinking about this recently, regarding poison dart frogs.

The frogs are poison, and bright. Some animals can't even see color. How did the bright colors naturally select themselves to be poison? They can't pass on their genes, because, if they get eaten, they die. Right??

I thought about it more and more, until I realized that there's probably an element that we're not seeing. In the same way an artist can draw an object by drawing the object itself, an artist can also draw an object by drawing the space around it.

The way evolution works, it just throws crap around using the phenomenon of mutation until something happens in the general environment over thousands of years. With poison dart frogs, it's likely that the bright colors are the RESULT of a trial that has already wrapped up.

Namely, I came to the conclusion that, at one point in history, there were a lot of normal-colored poisonous things. And those normal-colored things all got eaten, and they all died, and the things that wanted to eat them also all died. Both of those gene pools got deleted by each other. Both of those thingspredators that love to eat normal-colored poisonous thing, and the normal-colored poisonous thing itselfnow no longer exist. Leaving behind brightly-colored poisonous things, and things that don't think they'd be good to fool around with.

Mutation and evolution are never done, though. So who knows what the next natural selector will be. I.e. Poison dart frogs aren't cute enough, so, they get exterminated due to deforestation and how they weren't valuable enough to homo sapiens' exotic pet trade. Then, suddenly, a really "cute" poison dart frog mutates itself into existence. Voil, species saved...?

Same reason why americans freak out when they find out a hamburger has a vegetable on it.

They avoid unknown things.

so you're saying that poisonous animals that tasted good went extinct, but poisonous animals that are brightly colored and tasted bad

None of the above -- bright colors are often a visual warning about toxicity or bad taste. Either they're poisonous to eat (monarchs, poison dart frogs, some millipedes), or they have a poisonous defense mechanism (e.g. venomous snakes, bees/wasps, blister beetles). Or they taste or smell really bad (e.g. skunks, ladybeetles)

The whole point of those defenses is to avoid getting attacked in the first place, BTW.

Namely, I came to the conclusion that, at one point in history, there were a lot of normal-colored poisonous things. And those normal-colored things all got eaten, and they all died, and the things that wanted to eat them also all died. Both of those gene pools got deleted by each other. Both of those thingspredators that love to eat normal-colored poisonous thing, and the normal-colored poisonous thing itselfnow no longer exist. Leaving behind brightly-colored poisonous things, and things that don't think they'd be good to fool around with.

This is untrue, as there are still a LOT of normally-colored poisonous things, such as brown wasps, ant-black bees, the vast majority of spiders, black mambas, centipedes, many species of cyanide-secreting millipede, and some blister beetle species.

their friends died from eating it

yeah, but what animals that never ate a brightly colored animal before? They still tend to avoid eating bright animals

Probably through trial and error. They may eat one bright orange caterpillar and be like damn, this thing is foul and made my stomach hurt. They they avoid eating the others.

Beveren_Rabbit posted...

yeah, but what animals that never ate a brightly colored animal before? They still tend to avoid eating bright animals

The ones that were dumb enough to eat them either died out or else got tired of constantly barfing and shitting their guts out that they learned to avoid them and also taught their young to do so.

yeah, but why don't dogs learn to leave porcupines or skunks alone until its too late?

Did that guy just pull out a xenomorph egg from the water o.O

It's Aposematism, also known as warning coloration. The predators gain learned avoidance and those bright colors become a natural deterrent.

And even though it's called "learned" avoidance, it's something that can be passed down through genes, that will make predators instinctively avoid eating those brightly colored prey.

Beveren_Rabbit posted...

yeah, but why don't dogs learn to leave porcupines or skunks alone until its too late?

they dont really die from doing that so they never learn not to as a species

_____Cait posted...

Same reason why americans freak out when they find out a hamburger has a vegetable on it.

They avoid unknown things.

This seems like random hip fire

Do Americans pass on anything genetically from driving?