Conservation & Evolutionary Biology Lab
 
Department of Entomology,
National Taiwan University

Aposematic colouration

 

The biological function of colouration on weevils remains uncovered until my research in my PhD program (Tseng et al. 2014) . In this study, alloptric lizards had a significantly higher rate to attack the weevils than sympatric lizards, who have already learned that the weevils are too hard to be swallowed. However, masking the astonishing colour markings could increase the attacks from the lizards. Furthermore, the body shape of weevils is also an important cue for predators to significantly affect predation rate (Lee et al. 2018), and this result might explain the variable marking (e.g. stripes or spots) on sympatric weevils in a particular habitat.

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References

    Tseng, H.-Y., C.-P. Lin, J.-Y. Hsu, D. A. Pike, and W.-S. Huang. 2014. The functional significance of aposematic signals: geographic variation in the responses of widespread lizard predators to colourful invertebrate prey. PloS one 9:e91777.

    Lee, C. Y., S. P. Yo, R. Clark, J. Y. Hsu, C. P. Liao, H. Y. Tseng, and W. S. Huang. 2018. The role of different visual characters of weevils signalling aposematism to sympatric lizard predators. Journal of Zoology 306: 36-47.