Predators may either learn to avoid aposematic prey or may avoid it because of an innate bias. Learned as well as innate avoidance has been observed in birds, but the existing evidence is based on experiments with rather few unrelated model species. We compared the origin of avoidance in European species of tits (Paridae). First, we tested whether wild-caught birds (blue tits, great tits, crested tits, coal tits, willow tits, and marsh tits) avoid aposematic (red and black) adult firebugs Pyrrhocoris apterus (Heteroptera) more than nonaposematic (brown painted) ones. Larger proportion of birds avoided aposematic than brown-painted firebugs in majority of species (except coal tits). Second, we tested whether naive hand-reared birds of 4 species (blue tits, great tits, crested tits, and coal tits) attack or avoid aposematic and nonaposematic firebugs, both novel for them. Behavior of the naive blue tits and coal tits was similar to that of the wild-caught birds; majority of them did not attack the firebugs. Contrastingly, the naive great tits and crested tits behaved differently than the wild-caught conspecific adults; majority of the wild-caught birds avoided the aposematic firebugs, whereas the naive birds usually did not show any initial avoidance and had to learn to avoid the aposematic prey. Our results show that the origin of avoidance may be different even in closely related species. Because blue tits and coal tits avoided not only aposematic firebugs but also their brown-painted form, we interpret their behavior as innate neophobia rather than innate bias against the warning coloration.

In spite of the existence of many experimental studies on the function of warning coloration in insects, little is known about the universality of rea

The importance of today's zoological gardens as the so-called “Noah's Ark” grows as the natural habitat of many species quickly diminishes. Their potential to shelter a large amount of individuals from many species gives us the opportunity to reintroduce a species that disappeared in nature. However, the selection of animals to be kept in zoos worldwide is highly selective and depends on human decisions driven by both ecological criteria such as population size or vulnerability and audience-driven criteria such as aesthetic preferences. Thus we focused our study on the most commonly kept and bred animal class, the mammals, and we asked which factors affect various aspects of the mammalian collection of zoos. We analyzed the presence/absence, population size, and frequency per species of each of the 123 mammalian families kept in the worldwide zoo collection. Our aim was to explain these data using the human-perceived attractiveness of mammalian families, their body weight, relative brain size and species richness of the family. In agreement with various previous studies, we found that the body size and the attractiveness of mammals significantly affect all studied components of the mammalian collection of zoos. There is a higher probability of the large and attractive families to be kept. Once kept, these animals are presented in larger numbers in more zoos. On the contrary, the relative mean brain size only affects the primary selection whether to keep the family or not. It does not affect the zoo population size or the number of zoos that keep the family.

Persistent questions concerning the warning coloration of unpalatable insects address whether the bright aposematic colour itself or its combination w