ABOVE: Heliconius erato demophoon
RICCARDO PAPA, UNIVERSITY OF PUERTO RICO
As early as 1879, naturalist Fritz Müller noted that many of the Heliconius butterflies he found in the Amazon shared the exact same blazing black, red, and white wing color patterns, although they were different species. He reasoned that the butterflies had come to resemble each other’s striking coloration—indicating to birds that they were toxic and not to be eaten—aiding the species’ survival because the more individuals with these colorations, the faster predators learn to avoid them, an idea that became enshrined in textbooks as “Müllerian mimicry.”
How the butterflies evolved to resemble one another has long been a mystery. One pressing question for evolutionary biologists is whether pairs of lookalike butterfly species took the same paths to arrive at the same color pattern, using the same genetic and developmental machinery every time, or did they effectively reinvent the wheel, coming ...
