Thanks Vivek, it happened. See you in Edinburgh?

Haha, thanks Benito - there is certainly plenty more colsci to come.

We conclude that whether animals evolve camouflage or warning colouration as their antipredator strategy depends on multiple mechanisms. This helps explain the evolution and global distribution of camouflaged and warningly coloured animals. 6/6

Several other variables were important too, including whether the predator community had lots of insectivore specialists, the colours of other butterflies and moths in the prey community, and how gloomy the forest was. Please take a look at the paper for details! 5/6

We found predator competition had the largest effect, and it was bad news for prey with warning colouration – they were more likely to be sampled but slow to be learnt when hungry predators were competing for resources. 4/6

In 21 different forests we exposed over 15,000 camouflaged and warning coloured artificial ‘moths’ to avian predation 🐦‍⬛.

How do differences in predator and prey communities and light environment between locations affect predation on each colour strategy? 3/6

Iliana Medina and I assembled a team of 50+ amazing collaborators inc.
@jmappes.bsky.social @hannahmrowland.bsky.social hmrowland.bsky.social @facasaro.bsky.social saro.bsky.social @jtroscianko.bsky.social + many not on Bsky to run a field predation experiment across six continents. 2/6