Evolution: Mimicry meets the mitochondrion

One hundred and thirty-five years ago, Henry Walter Bates noticed striking similarities between unrelated pierid, ithomiine and heliconiine butterflies collected from the same area [1]. Bates termed this phenomenon ‘mimicry’, and showed that rare or unprotected butterflies would gain by imitating the warning patterns of commoner, unpalatable forms. Later, Müller [2] showed that unpalatable species would also converge, because predators should take a lower proportion of individuals that share a warning signal. Today, mimicry is not merely accepted, it remains one of the clearest paradigms of natural selection, cited in almost all textbooks of evolution.