Collection 

Celebrating Bates

2025 marks 200 years since the birth of Henry Walter Bates, who gave the first scientific account of mimicry in butterflies. To commemorate this anniversary, we bring together a selection of research articles and news and opinion pieces on mimicry and other forms of deception from across journals in the Nature portfolio.

mounted specimens of mimetic butterflies with orange and black wings in family Nymphalidae.

Bates, H.W. Contributions to an Insect Fauna of the Amazon Valley (Lepidoptera: Heliconidæ). Transactions of the Linnean Society of London 23: 495–56, 1862. A shortened version of the paper is available at 10.1111/j.1095-8312.1981.tb01842.x