Take caterpillars for example: if a bird eats a fatally poisonous caterpillar and dies immediately, it learned nothing, the caterpillar gained nothing for being poisonous, and that caterpillar species will continue to be preyed upon.
But if a caterpillar is only mildly toxic, and a bird eats it, the bird may survive and learn to avoid things that look like it, and that caterpillar species as a whole benefits as the cycle continues.
Am I missing something obvious? Wouldn’t it make more sense for mild toxicity to prevail as the more advantageous trait, over time?
edit: another point of confusion — more toxic animals tend to advertise their unsavoriness with bright colors. We generally accept that predators know to avoid brightly colored prey, but if they die during their very first encounter with one, how is that info passed along to other predators?
In: Biology
In general you have to remember a single bird/bug/whatever does not matter (of course there are exceptions like pandas because of a slew of breeding problems)
You are looking at it as if both do matter, but it is the group that does. Animals may not be super intelligent but they aren’t so dumb as to avoid learning. That bird over there ate it and died, now I’m not going to eat it. And if enough of us living birds decide not to eat it eventually very few will be eaten.
The mildly poisonous approach ends up as nothing but a generational arms race as the bug gets stronger poisons to counter the built up immunity until eventually the bird becomes completely immune to the poison and now it is open season forever
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