Ecological context of melanism in tea geometrids in tea gardens (IMAGE)
Caption
In tea gardens (represented as bottom left), tea plants grow as dense branched shrubs, making visual recognition from aerial views difficult. In addition, both color morphs (melanic and grey) are not well-camouflaged against their resting backgrounds of leaves or twigs. Thus, strong selection by visual predators seems to be absent or unclear for the color variations in tea geometrids.
Credit
Photos are from Yongjian Liu and Hongxin Jiang.
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