AI Tests A 200-Year-Old Evolutionary Theory

This is the tiger longwing, formally known as Heliconius hecale. Artificial intelligence helped confirm one of the oldest ideas in evolution, but it also raised some new questions. The natural world is full of copycats. Pyralid moths use the same high-pitched warning noises as tiger moths to warn away predators, and harmless king snakes and venomous coral snakes have similar coloration. King snakes and pyralid moths are using something called Batesian mimicry, when a harmless species wards off predators by passing itself off as something fiercer or more toxic. That's not a delibrate ruse, of course; it's just that over time, the king snakes that survived long enough to reproduce tended to be the ones more easily mistaken for a coral snake, so they passed on that resemblance to their offspring.