Some camouflaged animals hide colour signals and display them only transiently. These hidden colour signals are often conspicuous and are used as a secondary defence to warn or startle predators (deimatic displays) and/or to confuse them (flash displays). The hidden signals used in these displays frequently resemble typical aposematic signals, so it is possible that prey with hidden signals have evolved to employ colour patterns of a form that predators have previously learned to associate with unprofitability. Here, we tested this hypothesis by conducting two experiments that examined the effect of predator avoidance learning on the efficacy of deimatic and flash displays. We found that the survival benefits of both deimatic and flash displays were substantially higher against predators that had previously learned to associate the hidden colours with unprofitability than against naive predators. These findings help explain the phenological patterns we found in 1568 macro-lepidopteran species on three continents: species with hidden signals tend to occur later in the season than species without hidden signals.

中文翻译：

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具有隐藏颜色防御的猎物受益于它们与 aposematic 信号的相似性

一些伪装的动物隐藏颜色信号并且只是短暂地显示它们。这些隐藏的颜色信号通常很显眼，用作二级防御来警告或惊吓掠食者（deimatic 显示）和/或迷惑它们（闪光显示）。这些显示中使用的隐藏信号通常类似于典型的隐喻信号，因此带有隐藏信号的猎物可能已经进化到采用捕食者之前学会将其与无利可图联系起来的颜色模式。在这里，我们通过进行两个实验来检验这一假设，这些实验检查了捕食者回避学习对 deimatic 和 flash 显示效果的影响。我们发现，对于先前学会将隐藏颜色与无利可图联系起来的捕食者，与对抗天真的捕食者相比，deimatic 和闪光显示的生存益处要高得多。这些发现有助于解释我们在三大洲的 1568 种大型鳞翅目物种中发现的物候模式：具有隐藏信号的物种比没有隐藏信号的物种往往出现在季节后期。