Re: Animals that are poisonous to ingestion Social Behavior



"Perplexed in Peoria" jimmenegay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:-

<drosen0000@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ee4607$jce$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I doubt that Blue Jays have learned that information "instinctually",
meaning that it's not yet incorporated into their germline DNA. I
suspect that each individual bird must eat one or two Monarchs before
he gets the idea, but once he does, the death of those individuals
protects thousands of others.


Of course, it doesn't really help any of the Monarch descendents
that would have been born if the prey individual had survived. However,
maybe some form of frequency dependent selection would give venomosity
a long term advantage.

You are missing an essential point about Monarchs. A Monarch doesn't
have to 'work at' being toxic. It is toxic due to its milkweed diet.
It may have to 'work at' *looking* toxic - i.e. having a bright orange
color. But that work pays off for the individual that does it.

JE:-
It pays for _both_ predator and prey to teach a naive predator that a
particular prey happens to be poison simply because it does not benefit a
predator to attempt to eat poison prey or for (most) prey to be eaten.
Selection can assimilate (as described by Waddington) something of what a
predator needs to learn into heritable genetic information even if this is
just an increased capacity to learn (the ability to learn can be regarded as
a complex heritable trait). Mutualising selection will employ warning
coloration mimicry. Mullarian mimicry selects for different species to
employ similar warning colors and patterns because this increases
efficiency, i.e. new predators take less time to learn costing them and the
prey species, less. This increase in efficiency will result in a larger TDF
(Total Darwinian Fitness is defined as the total number of fertile adult
forms reproduced per parent per population) for both predator and prey
providing _more_ and not _less_ numbers of prey.

It
doesn't require altruism or deme-level selection. In fact, it pays
off so well that Viceroys mimic Monarch coloration - again for selfish
reasons.

JE:-
I am unsure if after the butterfly emerges it remains infertile or it
immediately becomes fertile. I am also unsure if the infertile caterpillar
stage also displays warning coloration. What I am sure about is that gene
centric Neo Darwinism always fails to discriminate between fertile and
infertile bodies because they prefer to reverse empirical causation within
gene centric arguments. Genes do not use bodies to replicate more genes,
fertile bodies use genes to reproduce more fertile bodies. Either way an
observer will count more genes. It should be just obvious that if the
majority of bodies taken by a new predator happen to be infertile immatures
then the cost to that prey species becomes very much less.

Is the following scenario deme-level selection? Presume that the
Monarch doesn't travel very far in a generation, relative to the
hunting range of the individual Blue Jay. If the range of the Monarch
was extremely limited, with or without the propensity to live together,
then a particular Monarch is probably surrounded by its sisters,
brothers, cousins, etc. The sicker (but wiser) Blue Jay then won't be
such a hazard to the Monarchs kin. Or even other Monarchs that are
distantly related from the unfortunate individual. If these distant
relatives have similar coloration, they get the same protection that
they would receive it they were closely related. Is this scenario
without kin-slection an example of "deme-level" selection?

JE:-
If you look more closely at kin selection you will see that it is exactly
the same process as group selection. What both predator and prey require is
for any new predator to learn as quickly as possible. What you are observing
here is a classical case of Darwinian mutualising selection.

snip<

Regards,

John Edser
Independent Researcher

edser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx



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