Some organisms use their appearance as a defense. Aplasmatic coloration is warning coloration, usually in the form of bright colors that signal chemical defenses. So as we can see with this poisonous frog here, it is brightly colored. That bright red, it's just going to pop. And it's there to signal to predators that, hey, I'm poisonous. I mean, you can see me, if you want to eat me go for it, but you're not going to be happy. Now cryptic coloration is the opposite. Instead of drawing attention to yourself, you're trying to camouflage, and this is going to make prey hard to see. Now believe it or not, there is a lizard on this tree right here. It is super well camouflaged. So I'm just going to go ahead and kind of trace its outline, so you can see. Hopefully, you can, kind of, get the idea. But, yeah, there is a lizard hiding there, it is just incredibly well disguised.

Now, speaking of disguises, mimicry is a really interesting evolved defense. And basically, it's when one organism evolves to resemble another in some way, and this could be in appearance, in smell, in sound, and even in behavior. We'll look at two examples of mimicry here. The first is Batesian mimicry, which is mimicry when a species sort of tries to imitate the warning signs of some other harmful species. So classic example is this, we have the coral snake up top, which is poisonous, and this mimic, the king snake right here, which is non-poisonous. And the king snake is using Batesian mimicry to fool other organisms into thinking it's a coral snake, and therefore, poisonous, and therefore, stay away. Now, Mullerian mimicry is when two distinct species mimic each other's warning signs. So in this case we have two types of butterflies, we have a monarch up here, and what's called a viceroy butterfly. They look very similar, and they both have the defense mechanism of being really bad tasting, they're very unpalatable. Now why would these two species mimic each other's warning signs? Well, it puzzled people for a long time. And then, basically someone created this mathematical model to show that by both species mimicking each other they actually increase their chances of survival because It's almost like this, if you're a predator and you learned that, you know, this one particular bug tastes bad and there's another bug that looks just like it, you're not really going to tell the difference between them. So it actually increases the fitness of both organisms to sort of have this convergence in appearance. Very very strange interesting stuff.