97, d.f. = 1, P = 0.161). There were no other significant differences between defensive treatments (all P > 0.7043). When predation was assumed to have occurred only in the unusual instance of the pastry bodies being partly removed from the targets (and targets with pastry entirely missing were censored by considering them as surviving up until that point, but not attacked by predators), there were again significant differences in mortality between defensive treatments (Wald = 21.38, d.f. = 4, P < 0.001). The pastry bodies

were partly removed from highly unpalatable targets significantly more than low-crypsis (Wald = 14.3, d.f. = 1, P < 0.001) and white (Wald = 8.84, d.f. = 1, P = 0.0029) targets, but not significantly more www.selleckchem.com/products/Lapatinib-Ditosylate.html than high-crypsis targets (Wald = 2.18, d.f. = 1, P = 0.1403) or targets with low unpalatability (Wald = 0.01, d.f. = 1, P = 0.95). There were no other significant differences between defensive treatments (all P > 0.1679). To our knowledge, this is the first time that predation rates on cryptic and aposematic prey have been directly compared in a field setting using wild predators. When prey were considered killed if either part or all of the pastry see more body was removed, the total mortality rate at the end of the 4-day survey period was high (77%); however, we found no significant

difference in survivorship between defensive treatments over the course of our experiment. This was an unexpected result, especially considering that we also found no significant difference in overall survivorship between the different defensive treatments (cryptic and aposematic) and the white palatable control, or between the different cryptic treatments. The white palatable control was assumed to be conspicuous but not warning coloured; however, it is possible that the white coloration MCE was aversive to predators (see Lyytinen et al., 1999). Likewise, we did not observe a significant effect of high-crypsis targets

on predation by wild birds compared to low-crypsis targets, even though the presence of edge-intersecting patches made them putatively disruptive (Stevens & Cuthill, 2006), and differences in predation between similar disruptive and monochrome prey have been demonstrated in previous studies (Cuthill et al., 2005; Stevens et al., 2006). One possible reason for this is that the colours on our high-crypsis targets may have had insufficient contrast (Schaefer & Stobbe, 2006), and therefore failed to achieve a disruptive effect. It is important to note that we observed significant variation in hazard rates between our experimental sites and between trials (Fig. 1 and Supporting Information Fig. S4, respectively), which could have masked differences in the effectiveness of our defensive treatments.