The predator orchid mantis lures its prey by mimicking flowers, Fox News reported.
Although it's not unheard-of for creatures to employ a variety of camouflage tactics in order to protect themselves from predators or to hunt their prey more effectively, it's the first-known predator to actually pretend to be an orchid to lure butterflies and other pollinators.
Scientists told Fox News that orchid mantises are better than the species they are imitating, they are better at drawing in insects than some actual blossoms. This means they not only look like flowers, "but they also beat the...beauties at their own game."
"There are other animals that are known to camouflage amongst flowers and ambush prey items, but they do not actually attract the pollinators themselves the flowers they sit on are the attractive stimulus," study lead author James O'Hanlon, an evolutionary biologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia told LiveScience.
According to O'Hanlon, the bug is unique in that the mantis itself is the attractive stimulus. This means the mantis can sit away from flowers, perhaps on leaves or bark, and still lure in pollinators.
"This is the only animal in the world that we know of that resembles a flower blossom to attract prey," O'Hanlon said.
The full flowery disguised-insect is complete with legs shaped like petals, "that is convincing enough for scientists to suggest this hunter not only uses the masquerade to hide from prey," but also to attract prey.
According to Fox news, some examples of such aggressive mimicry have been seen before in the wild: the bolas spider is known to attract male moths by imitating female moth sex pheromones.
Scientists have touted the idea of the orchid mantis as an aggressive mimic, or the resemblance of a predatory or parasitic species to another nonthreatening or even attractive species to lure prey, Fox News reported.
"The idea that the orchid mantis mimics a flower first came about over a century ago, but it was only ever just an idea nobody had done the experiments to test whether it actually occurred," O'Hanlon said. "Now, over a century later, we have textbooks and scientific articles stating that mantises mimic flowers as if it was an established fact. I felt it was my job to set the record straight and actually see whether this phenomenon was possible."
To test the hypothesis, scientists ventured to Malaysia.
While there, researchers confirmed that the color of the orchid mantis was indistinguishable from 13 species of wild flowers in the areas the predator lived. They tested the colors under the wavelengths of light visible to the flying, pollinating insects most likely to visit the blossoms, such as bees and butterflies.
"The hardest part about this kind of research is that you are conducting research on an animal that nobody has ever researched before," O'Hanlon said. "We knew almost nothing about them and had to start from complete scratch."
They also watched how wild pollinators behaved around live orchid mantises in the forest. Researchers saw more than a dozen instances of flying insects captured by the flower disguised predator.
"We now know that not only is it possible for mantises to lure pollinators, but we know that they are amazingly good at it ... they can attract even more pollinators than some flowers," O'Hanlon said.
