Investigating imperfect mimicry through the large North American velvet ant Mullerian mimicry complex

Color mimicry is often celebrated as one of the most straightforward examples of evolution by natural selection. Most of the well-known examples of mimicry come from tropical taxa, with Neotropical butterflies being among the most celebrated model systems. Here, I introduce a recently discovered large Müllerian mimicry complex in North American Velvet ants. In addition to being the largest known Mullerian mimicry complex, velvet ants also provide a model system to study the phenomenon of imperfect mimicry. Imperfect mimicry, the fact that some mimics do not resemble eachother very closely has baffeled researchers for years. Several hypotheses have been developed to explain the poor match between some mimics and models and three of these are tested with velvet ants, the body size hypothesis, the community diversity hypothesis, and the mulit-model hypothesis. These tests show that many factors likely influence the evolution of imperfect mimics.