Practice question

In defensive mimicry, a model is the organism whose genuine properties give meaning to the signal copied by another species. A venomous coral snake bears a conspicuous banded pattern that predators may learn, or sometimes be predisposed, to avoid. A harmless or less dangerous snake resembling that pattern can consequently receive protection as a Batesian mimic. The coral snake is therefore the defended reference phenotype, while the look-alike is the mimic. Calling the coral snake an educator anthropomorphizes the process: predators acquire information through encounters, but the snake does not intentionally teach them. “Host” is used when another organism lives in or on it, which is not the defining relationship in this example. The model–mimic designation can depend on the biological system and geographical overlap, because local predator experience and the presence of genuinely dangerous coral snakes influence whether resemblance is protective. The central criterion is not which species appeared first, but which participant possesses the defense that maintains predator avoidance of the shared signal.