ScienceToons #1: Mimicry

I walk into frame in live action with an animated lizard and dark green background behind me.

Why do animals change over time? 

Cut straight to lizard.

Here we have this cute agama lizard. He’s hungry. He gotta eat!

He loves to eat butterflies. There are a ton of butterflies around here. Here we have a beautiful little blue butterfly flying about, minding their own business. 

Oh wait, the agama just ate it.

All the time, the blue butterflies keep getting eaten by the agama. The butterflies make more baby butterflies, but then they also get eaten by the agama. 

The nightmare never ends.

However, one day, a butterfly was born unlike the other blue butterflies. It was pink. This butterfly was pink because of a mutation. The butterfly is perfectly fine though, it’s just like any other butterfly. It just happens to be pink.

But an interesting thing happened.

The agama ate its entire family…but not it. The agama ignored it. It knows that it has eaten non-blue butterflies before and it has gotten sick.

Spared, the pink butterfly goes on to live its life. It starts dating, lives its best life, and has babies.

An interesting thing happened though. A few of its babies were pink too.

When its time for the agama to eat again, it ate many blue butterflies, but the pink ones were left unharmed.

Those surviving pink butterflies got to live their life and had babies.

An interesting thing happened again; there were more pink babies.

After several generations, there were less and less blue butterflies and more and more pink butterflies.

The agama went to eat elsewhere.

Over generations, our butterflies changed color from blue to pink. A butterfly that looked poisonous was less likely to be eaten. This was a positive change, as it helped them survive, and therefore make more butterflies. 

This is change over time, which in science we call Evolution. This specific example was by using Mimicry, which is when one organism mimics another to their advantage.

In this video, this process happened in a few generations, but in real life, this process would take hundreds of generations. But because of this, over time, animals change in ways we don’t expect or realize.