EEB Tuesday Seminar Series - Complexity and Color Pattern Evolution in a Snake Mimicry System

This event is part of our ongoing Tuesday Seminar Series.

About the seminar: Mimicry is an evolutionary phenomenon that crafts phenotypes into shared signals through strongly-selected ecological interactions. Predators are effectively fooled into avoiding perfectly edible prey, because these “mimics” evolve phenotypes that make them appear similar to toxic inedible species. These small-scale ecological interactions are drivers of phenotypic evolution, thus creating large-scale phenotypic patterns that manifest across phylogenies. My dissertation will investigate aspects of this complexity within coral snake mimicry, an assortment of venomous and nonvenomous snakes brightly colored in their shared signal – bands of red and black. I will discuss my first chapter, which leverages phenotypic variation to test hypotheses from mimicry theory at a macro scale, and some of another chapter, a theoretical model of snake mimicry.