Word: robber
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...tonight at 8 p.m. in the Lowell House Junior Common Room. Miss Welty's works include several volumes of short stories: A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Bride of Innisfallen; a book of interrelated stories: The Golden Apples; a novel: Delta Wedding; and two short novels: The Robber Bridgeroom and The Ponder Heart. She has received three O. Henry Memorial Prizes, two Guggenheim Awards, an Harvard from the National Institute for Arts and Letters, and in 1955 the William Dean Howells Medal, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished work of American...
Instead of working with butterflies, the Drs. Brower selected two insects, the bumblebee and the robber fly, that are very distantly related but look very much alike. Both are covered with light and dark fur; both have hairy legs and buzz...
...robber fly even has bunches of light hair on its hind legs to resemble the baskets of pollen that the bumblebee usually carries. The big difference between the two: the bee can sting and the robber fly cannot. The two doctors reasoned that the robber fly's beelike appearance protects it from predators that fear the sting of real bumblebees...
...prove this theory, they put toads in cages and offered them live dragonflies, bumblebees and robber flies. Inexperienced toads accepted all three alike, but toads that grabbed the bees got stung. Once stung, they would eat neither bumblebees nor robber flies, though the flies, in spite of their appearance, could not sting them...
...Brower believe that this experiment proves the survival value of mimicry for insects that are able to make themselves sound, look or act like less attractive relatives. But they think that the robber fly may get a second advantage from its resemblance to the bumblebee...