Ecology

Ecology

An organism has several ways to avoid being prated upon. One way to avoid this is to practice crptis. Crypis is the action of organisms avoiding predation by blending in with their backgrounds and matching the color pattern of a bark, twigs or leaves. Palatable animals often utilize this strategy as well. Another type of defense is aposematism or warning coloratio. Organisms that produce noxious chemicals or accumalate them from food plants, advertise the fact that they are harmful with conspicous color patterns. Mimicry is the resemblence of an organism toward some other organism or an object inthe enviroment, evolved to decieve predators or prey into confuding the organism with that which it mimics. The prey involved within this experiment utilized mimisry as their defense stategy.

Batesia mimicry, Mullerian mimicry, and aggressive mimicry are all various forms of mimicry. Batesian mimicry is a resemblance of an unpalatable species (model) by an edible species (mimic) to decieve predators. Mullerian minicry is a mutual resemblance of two or more conspicuousyly marked upalatable species to enhance predator avoidance. Aggressive mimicry is a tactic that enables predators to avoid being detected by their prey or even to attract prey. The type of mimicry that was utilized within this experiment is Batesian mimicry.

The purpose of thsi experiment is to observe predators or in this case birds, and determine whether or not mimicry developed based on the fact that the birds learned about what was really going on. Mimicry doesn't always develop,. The predator must be smartiin order to realize that some are tasteful, while others are distasteful. Our predators can determine this by realizing that a color strategy is bein...

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... as much as s the lime was another indication that mimicry had occured. The blue was only 25% unpalatable there fore it should have yeilded much higher results than the lime. Some times as was a little confused as to whether my accepting or rejecting a null hypothesis was correct. This is because the chi square analysis isn't a procedure thatalways ccurately reject or support the null hypothesis. The chi square analysis is most likely a test of randomness, rather than a test for supporting or rejecting the null hypothesis. This is also why we say that we fail to rejact it, because, just because we fail to reject it doesn't mean that it is correct, therefore we cannot accept it. This is also why it is good to have graphs, in an experiment like this one, so that they can back up your results and hypothesis, because it is giving you a visual sense of what is going on.