Does it look good? I'm just pretending! After reading this article, be careful when you see flowers...

A few days ago, when I was surfing the Internet, I saw a post. A young man was visiting an orchid exhibition in a botanical garden. He inadvertently saw an orchid seem to twist. At first, the young man thought he was dazzled, but when he looked closely, he found an orchid mantis in camouflage.

Did you find the orchid mantis in the picture?

There's no way, it imitates it too well.

It's not just the orchid mantis. Some "masters of camouflage" also like to imitate the appearance of flowers. If you don't look carefully, it's easy to ignore them until people discover their true appearance.

More real than flowers

Historically, the history of the discovery of the orchid mantis is actually quite similar to the story above.

In 1879, a traveler James Newston encountered a strange orchid on the island of Java. When butterflies, bees and other insects approached it, the "orchid" suddenly opened its petals and captured them.

Image 2 Source: James O'Hanlon

James was so surprised by this operation that he drew the "orchid" and sent it to naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. At first, Wallace thought it was some kind of carnivorous plant, such as a Venus flytrap. But after observation, he did not see the digestive part of the "orchid", but the petals looked like roots. In the end, he thought it was a mantis, and it was a mantis that evolved the color of its petals and could imitate orchids.

So why do mantises imitate orchids? To answer this question, we can't avoid the issue of survival and reproduction.

Female orchid mantises are much larger than males. Image credit: Jason Zhu

Like most mantises, orchid mantises also have the tradition of "eating their husbands" on their wedding night. This is because female mantises need to eat a lot during mating to ensure the number of offspring they produce.

However, although the male mantis can eat, it can only eat once! It is possible that it will not be able to eat at all. In order to get more food, the female mantis starts to move towards the path of "being a flower", and accidentally becomes the "Oiran".

Butterfly "tricked" by orchid mantis Photo credit: James O'Hanlon

Studies have found that in the eyes of some pollinating insects, orchid mantises are even more attractive than real orchids. For example, a group of bees originally flew along a predetermined route, but when they discovered the "fake orchids" disguised as orchid mantises, they would even deviate from their original route and fly towards the location of the orchid mantises.

The reason is that the orchids disguised as orchids by the orchid mantis are larger and more colorful, which is a high-quality nectar source for bees!

Image credit: Vince Adam

Therefore, it is reasonable that the orchid mantis has reached the pinnacle of "making flowers" and is even more charming.

However, although the orchid mantis has stolen the limelight from the real orchid, when the insects that come to pollinate are persecuted, they will still turn to the arms of the real orchid, so they can be regarded as indirectly helping the orchid to attract more pollinating insects, and the two have a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship.

As to why it chose to imitate orchids, there is currently no reasonable answer. Some scientists speculate that when the mantis chose to evolve towards the path of flowers, there happened to be an orchid next to it.

You are the petals, I am the pistil

We all know that spiders generally make webs and hunt for a living, but a kind of crab spider has given up this traditional craft and switched to "making flowers".

Female yellow crab spider on a daisy. Photo credit: britannica

They imitate the colors of different flowers. When they hide among a certain flower, they will change the surface of their body into a color similar to that of the flower. Their purpose is to catch insects that come to pollinate and collect nectar, while also trying to deceive their predators.

In animal communication, color is a very balanced method. On the one hand, animals need to be recognized by their own kind, but on the other hand, they cannot be discovered by prey or predators. This tests the "disguiser"'s ability to control color.

Image source: Wikimedia common

Generally speaking, different organisms have different photoreceptors, which results in different ranges of colors that their visual systems can see. For example, birds have four types of cones, red, blue, green, and ultraviolet (UV), while most hymenopterans have only three types of cones, blue, green, and ultraviolet (UV).

In order to "disappear" from the eyes of prey and predators, crab spiders need to precisely match the color of a certain part of the flower.

For example, when a crab spider hides on a flower, birds, through their four-cone color vision system, will see that the crab spider's disguised corolla is a little brighter than the real corolla. However, since birds automatically eliminate some color differences when observing small targets, they will not notice the subtle differences on the flowers.

Crab spider hiding in white petals preys on bees

The same is true for some flower-visiting insects, such as bees. In this way, the crab spider's color-mimicking ability plays a very good role in the visual systems of both predators and prey.

In addition to the little trick of color, Chinese scientists recently discovered another new trick of male crab spiders.

In a tropical rainforest in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, a male crab spider lies on a female crab spider. In a sea of ​​flowers, the two of them look like a "complete flower". The discoverer believes that this may be a cooperative behavior evolved through survival selection.

Because female crab spiders spend most of their time camouflaged on flowers, and if male crab spiders want to have a chance to mate, they have to run to the flowers to find females.

But the male crab spider still has to solve a problem: how to avoid being discovered by predators? To this end, it chooses to climb onto the back of the female crab spider and disguise itself as a pistil. This way, predators will have the illusion that they are one flower. This cooperation model can not only increase survival rate, but also improve predation efficiency, which is killing two birds with one stone.

In general, whether it is the exquisite imitation of the orchid mantis or the color tricks of the crab spider, it is all to better cope with the pressure of survival. After all, whose life is not lived with "disguise"?

References:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep37753

Male and female crab spiders “cooperate” to mimic a flower

https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2721

Predator and prey views of spider camouflage

doi.org/10.1038/415133a

Author: Fish

Winner of the Silver Award for Outstanding Science Popularization Works of China Science Writers Association

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Editor: Dong Xiaoxian