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UnDisciplined: how "thinking like a predator" helped a USU ecologist study bumble bee mimicry

Joseph Wilson
/
USU

At a quick glance, you'd likely have a very hard time distinguishing Bombus vagan, the half black Bumblebee from Laphria flavicollis, a species of Robber fly that is also yellow up top in black in the back. And that's the idea behind mimicry, an evolutionary survival tactic in which multiple species share a similar appearance in order to signal to predators that they should be left alone. But who is mimicking who and do predators actually know – or do they care?

Joseph Wilson is an ecologist at Utah State University who is interested in the drivers of evolutionary diversification in insects.

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