Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff. Lauren vogelbaumb here. One of our favorite things about science is that it can really surprise us. Consider the case of the elusive insect, the orchidmantis. Orchid mantises live in the rainforests of Southeast Asia. The females are big, measuring about two and a half inches long that's about six and a half centimeters. Their male counterparts, meanwhile, only grow to about an inch long maybe three centimeters. If you've
never seen one, they're worth looking up. They look strikingly like orchid flowers. Their bodies and limbs are colored white to a delicate pink, often with details of purple on their heads, and patterns of brighter pink, yellow, green, or black on their backs and lower limbs. They are two pairs of hind legs used for walking, have wide, flat
surfaces that look like flower petals. Since they were first described in scientific literature and more than one hundred years ago, it was thought that these floral mantises evolved to imitate orchid flowers and thus potential prey that are attracted to or live among those flowers. By hiding among real blossoms. It was thought they could sneak attack anything that happened by moths, butterflies, beetles, or even frogs and scorpions. This
type of evolutionary behavior is called cryptic mimicry. It can be used on the offense or defense, and it just makes sense, right. It was commonly accepted as fact until a few years ago. Okay, so, in the twenty teens, a couple of different research groups were conducting systematic field testing to see how adult orchid mantises operate. It turns out those females weren't hiding at all. Insects were more attracted to the female orchid manaces than to real flowers.
It was still a deception, but the other insects were belining towards them, sometimes literally, you know. In the case of bees. This is known not as cryptic mimicry, but as aggressive mimicry. By evolving to be larger and more flower like, female mantises increase their chances of attracting and catching their preferred prey. They don't even look like one
particular species of flower. The research shows that their coloration imitates several different species from an insect's perspective that coloration from a distance, the screams tasty nectar found here. As the insect approaches the orchidmantis, the petal shaped legs confirm what the insect thinks to be true. It's a flower, so it goes in, and the mantis knabs and eats
the critically misguided insect. These findings might not sound super different from the previous hypothesis, but they're interesting for a few reasons. First, this is one of the first times the female adaptation in a species has been observed to be for predatory purposes and not reproductive ones. A sexual dimorphism is when a male and female of the same
species evolve to look and operate a little differently. Usually the adaptations are both for reproductive purposes, but in the case of female orchidmantises, they adapted because they were hungry, not directly to improve their chances of having more or healthier babies. Their male counterparts meanwhile, evolved to be smaller and to use their patterning as camouflage to avoid being eaten by predators. Of course, both of these behaviors indirectly
improve the mantis's chances of reproducing by surviving longer. The second, the orchidmantis is the first animal known to mimic not just a part of a blossom, but an entire blossom, including color, petal shape, et cetera, to attract insects of its own accord. And finally, these types of studies highlight how systematic field research can lead to answers you weren't expecting, or indeed weren't even attempting to find. One of the studies that contributed to this knowledge wasn't even looking at
orchidmantises specifically, but at mantis taxonomic classification in general. They were hoping to reclassify some different mantis species to better align with their actual evolutionary history. But when they started to notice this pattern in orchidmantis evolution, favoring larger, more colorful females that could catch bigger prey, they honed in. Oh. Once again, animals prove that we can't always predict why they do what they do or look how they look.
Mother Nature continues to surprise us in beautiful and deadly ways, perhaps especially if you're a bug. Today's episode is based on the article the orchidmantis looks like a flower, it stings like a Bee on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by Alison Troutner. A brain Stuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with hostuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. But four more podcasts from my heart Radio.
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