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E_M_E_T t1_itd8osh wrote

Reply to comment by ramriot in is it the case that poisonous animals tend to be colourful and if so why is it that they tend to evolve to be colourful moreso then other animals? by HumbleProdiGenius

I think that's a decent theory but it might have a big problem. If non-poisonous animals start to resemble poisonous ones, then the selection pressure for looking poisonous goes away, as there's only a limited amount of food out there and predators will inevitably realize that some of the colorful prey are tasty as well.

So if the Hover Fly evolution theory is true, then you have to either go with the assumption that food scarcity just isn't enough to push animals back towards older behavior, or you can assume that this trend towards colorful poisonous animals comes and goes in cycles.

Maybe the answer is that Earth's biodiversity reached some kind of equilibrium in the past and the number of new, colorful yet non-poisonous species equals the number of new, poisonous yet colorless species. So the generalization of "colorful animals are poisonous" is always true enough.

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ramriot t1_itdsx9e wrote

Yes, as someone else put it here about Betesian Mimicry the mimic will reach only a minority of the models population because it is becomes dominant the pressure goes away.

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