Mimesis

Mimesis 

  

Although I might actually move a little bit away from my topic, today I will enlighten another part of mimicry. The reason I say it is not all about my topic, is because a part of this mimicry I'm going to write about, will also be related to shape and not just color, but since I have already mentioned mimicry related to warning(batesian and mullerian) I find it natural to say a few words about other ways that mimic can help an animal, not just by advertising. So this time I will dive deeper into Mimesis. 

  

Mimesis is actually related to camouflage, but not in the in way we would normally think about it. Camouflage is as earlier mentioned, a way to blend in so no one can spot you, basically you look like the background, or have a way of not getting detected. Whit mimesis you are detectable, just not as the individual or the species you actually are. The thing here is that an animal don't mind being seen, as long as it is not interesting for the observer, meaning, if a predator is after you, you mimic something the predator don't eat. The animal were a disguise, and in this way, it will be camouflaged in a broad sense. It is not necessarily for these animals to be poisonous or anything, they simply look like something that the observer don't pay attention to. 

  

Often animals that do this type of mimicry will resemble something in their environment that also make them blend in, like a stone, leaf, branch etc. This means other animals will see the mimicking animal, but not actually realize what it is looking at. That is why this is actually a kind of camouflage.  

  

A lot of insects do this kind of camouflaging mimicry, and some examples would be: 

  

• Stick insects: Shaped and colored like a stick. You could easily look at it without ever realizing it is a living animal. 
• Mantists: Some can look like flowers, with beautiful colors so no prey would notice it, and the prey would encounter the predator and realize everything when it is to late. 
• Katidyds: Shaped like a leaf with green colors, or they could look like an ant, so predators would leave it alone. 
• Fish, lobster, and other sea-creatures looking like corals, polyps and sea-grass. 

  

In a broad sense, you could look at mimesis as something that covers almost all kinds of mimicry, because it means resembling something, whether this resemblance has to do with color, shape, sounds, if it mimics a living object or not, and also it could include mimicking of behavior and special kinds of advertisement. This would then included batesian and mullerian mimicry, but in most cases mimesis just implies to being something that is not interesting, something that goes unnoticed, and therefor other types of mimicry is not included here, and would rather be grouped or included elsewhere. 

In this short movie you can see a lot of different animals living in the sea pretending it is something else that would not interest the predator, that is if it is preyed upon, or if it is a predator – pretending it is something that is not dangerous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMNfpb87pe8#t=75
viewed 1 March 2014.

Bibliography:

Wang,
L, Liu, Z, Wang, X, Shih,
C,
Zhao, Y, Engel, MS, & Ren, D 2010,
Ancient pinnate leaf mimesis among lacewings,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States
of America, viewed 27 March 2014, <
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2941307/ >

Puetz, M 2002,

Mimesis,
The University of Chicago, Illinois, US, viewed 27 March 2014, <
http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/mimesis.htm
>