Henry Walter Bates, a 19th-century British naturalist, was an explorer who spent over a decade in the Amazon rainforest. During his time there, he collected over 14,000 species of insects and other animals, many of which were new to science. His observations of the behaviors and interrelationships of these species led him to discover a form of mimicry that would later be named after him, where a harmless species gains protection by mimicking the warning signals of an unpalatable or dangerous one.