Subject: insect mimicry

From: [email-masked] (m'names Kris)
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 1995 03:31:36 GMT

I'm doing research for a paper on mimicry--I haven't narrowed the topic down 
yet.  I'm looking for ideas, if anybody has them.  I'm thinking about Batesian 
mimicry in butterflies, or research on eye spots.  Please recommend books, 
papers, or other pet topics.     
                                                       thanks
                                                      undergrd @ OSU

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From: [email-masked] (Doug Yanega)
Date: 1 Feb 1995 15:12:51 GMT

> papers, or other pet topics.     

One of the best books to get you started is the small paperback called
"Mimicry" by Wolfgang Wickler, put out by McGraw Hill. There's also a book
in the "Survival in the Wild" series by Chicago Press, called "Camouflage
and Mimicry" by Denis Owen. The primary scientific literature, you'll
find, is full of debates over terminology. For instance, most folks do not
consider eye spots true mimicry, unless they resemble some particular
organism's eyes...there's a lot of semantics to get past when discussing
this topic, and people have even written papers about *that*! Since I
study bees, my pet topic is bee mimics, and there are probably more of
those than any other kind of true mimics (and some are truly phenomenal).
Cheers,
-- 
Doug Yanega
Illinois Natural History Survey, Center for Biodiversity
607 E. Peabody Dr. Champaign, IL 61820  USA
"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is
    the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick