Parasitism : organic and social / by Jean Massart and Émile Vandervelde ; translated by William Macdonald ; revised by J. Arthur Thomson.

  • Jean Massart
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Parasitism : organic and social / by Jean Massart and Émile Vandervelde ; translated by William Macdonald ; revised by J. Arthur Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    28/144 page 12
    shelters his soft unannoured abdomen within the empty shell of some mollusc. Seeing that the right- ful tenant is dead,1 we can lmrdly, in this case, speak of parasitism for support, any more than we can at- tribute nutritive parasitism to those organisms which live on corpses. In neither case does the animal live at the expense of another; it merely takes advantage of its neighbour’s remains. § 3. Mimetic Parasitism. We may speak of a “parasitism of livery,” or mimetic parasitism, when one organisent mimics another in form and colour, in such a way that it dérivés some advantage from the resemblance. What links mimicry to parasitism is the fact that it is necessarily pré- judiciai to the mimicked. Let us illustrate this by several examples of dif- ferent kinds of mimicry. 1. A carnivorous species mimics an inoffensive species in such a way that it is able to approach its victims without frightening thern. 2. One species mimics another in such a way that it is readily able to approach the latter to do it some liarm. 3. A weak and palatable species mimics one which is vvell-defended and unpalatable, in such a way that, 1 [The hennit crab does not always wait until the mollusc is dead.—IV.]
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3