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Pretending to be venomous: is a snake's head shape a trustworthy signal to a predator?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 May 2011

Murilo Guimarães  and
Ricardo J. Sawaya
Murilo Guimarães*
Affiliation:
Departamento de Biologia Animal, Programa de Pós Graduação em Ecologia, Instituto de Biologia, Caixa Postal 6109, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 13083–970, Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil
Ricardo J. Sawaya
Affiliation:
Departamento de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Rua Prof. Artur Riedel, 275, 09972-270, Diadema, São Paulo, Brazil
*
1Corresponding author. Email: mu.guima@gmail.com
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Extract

The difficulty of observing interactions between predators and their prey in natural systems has promoted the use of artificial replicas (Exnerová et al. 2006, Smith 1977). Plasticine replicas have been successfully used because they retain imprints of predation attempts and enable the identification of the predator (Brodie 1993).

Keywords

Brazildefencehead triangulationmorphologymimicryplasticine replicaspredationsnakes
Type
Short Communication
Information
Journal of Tropical Ecology , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , July 2011 , pp. 437 - 439
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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