Certain beetles have also been modified so as exactly to imitate wasps;
and in these cases the beetle waist, usually so solid, thick, and
clumsy, grows as slender and graceful as if the insects had been
supplied with corsets by a fashionable West End house. But the greatest
refinement of all is perhaps that noticed in certain allied species
which mimic bees, and which have acquired useless little tufts of hair
on their hind shanks to represent the dilated and tufted
pollen-gathering apparatus of the true bees.
I have left to the last the most marvellous cases of mimicry of
all--those noticed among South American butterflies by Mr. Bates, who
found that certain edible kinds exactly resembled a handsome and
conspicuous but bitter-tasted species 'in every shade and stripe of
colour.' Several of these South American imitative insects long deceived
the very entomologists; and it was only by a close inspection of their
structural differences that the utter distinctness of the mimickers and
the mimicked was satisfactorily settled. Scarcely less curious is the
case of Mr. Wallace's Malayan orioles, two species of which exactly copy
two pugnacious honey-suckers in every detail of plumage and coloration.
As the honey-suckers are avoided by birds of prey, owing to their
surprising strength and pugnacity, the orioles gain immunity from attack
by their close resemblance to the protected species. When Dr. Sclater,
the distinguished ornithologist, was examining Mr.
Pages:
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92