Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff.
Speaker 1: Lauren vogelbaumb here. One of our favorite things about science
Speaker 1: is that it can really surprise us. Consider the case
Speaker 1: of the elusive insect, the orchidmantis. Orchid mantises live in
Speaker 1: the rainforests of Southeast Asia. The females are big, measuring
Speaker 1: about two and a half inches long that's about six
Speaker 1: and a half centimeters. Their male counterparts, meanwhile, only grow
Speaker 1: to about an inch long maybe three centimeters. If you've
Speaker 1: never seen one, they're worth looking up. They look strikingly
Speaker 1: like orchid flowers. Their bodies and limbs are colored white
Speaker 1: to a delicate pink, often with details of purple on
Speaker 1: their heads, and patterns of brighter pink, yellow, green, or
Speaker 1: black on their backs and lower limbs. They are two
Speaker 1: pairs of hind legs used for walking, have wide, flat
Speaker 1: surfaces that look like flower petals. Since they were first
Speaker 1: described in scientific literature and more than one hundred years ago,
Speaker 1: it was thought that these floral mantises evolved to imitate
Speaker 1: orchid flowers and thus potential prey that are attracted to
Speaker 1: or live among those flowers. By hiding among real blossoms.
Speaker 1: It was thought they could sneak attack anything that happened
Speaker 1: by moths, butterflies, beetles, or even frogs and scorpions. This
Speaker 1: type of evolutionary behavior is called cryptic mimicry. It can
Speaker 1: be used on the offense or defense, and it just
Speaker 1: makes sense, right. It was commonly accepted as fact until
Speaker 1: a few years ago. Okay, so, in the twenty teens,
Speaker 1: a couple of different research groups were conducting systematic field
Speaker 1: testing to see how adult orchid mantises operate. It turns
Speaker 1: out those females weren't hiding at all. Insects were more
Speaker 1: attracted to the female orchid manaces than to real flowers.
Speaker 1: It was still a deception, but the other insects were
Speaker 1: belining towards them, sometimes literally, you know. In the case
Speaker 1: of bees. This is known not as cryptic mimicry, but
Speaker 1: as aggressive mimicry. By evolving to be larger and more
Speaker 1: flower like, female mantises increase their chances of attracting and
Speaker 1: catching their preferred prey. They don't even look like one
Speaker 1: particular species of flower. The research shows that their coloration
Speaker 1: imitates several different species from an insect's perspective that coloration
Speaker 1: from a distance, the screams tasty nectar found here. As
Speaker 1: the insect approaches the orchidmantis, the petal shaped legs confirm
Speaker 1: what the insect thinks to be true. It's a flower,
Speaker 1: so it goes in, and the mantis knabs and eats
Speaker 1: the critically misguided insect. These findings might not sound super
Speaker 1: different from the previous hypothesis, but they're interesting for a
Speaker 1: few reasons. First, this is one of the first times
Speaker 1: the female adaptation in a species has been observed to
Speaker 1: be for predatory purposes and not reproductive ones. A sexual
Speaker 1: dimorphism is when a male and female of the same
Speaker 1: species evolve to look and operate a little differently. Usually
Speaker 1: the adaptations are both for reproductive purposes, but in the
Speaker 1: case of female orchidmantises, they adapted because they were hungry,
Speaker 1: not directly to improve their chances of having more or
Speaker 1: healthier babies. Their male counterparts meanwhile, evolved to be smaller
Speaker 1: and to use their patterning as camouflage to avoid being
Speaker 1: eaten by predators. Of course, both of these behaviors indirectly
Speaker 1: improve the mantis's chances of reproducing by surviving longer. The second,
Speaker 1: the orchidmantis is the first animal known to mimic not
Speaker 1: just a part of a blossom, but an entire blossom,
Speaker 1: including color, petal shape, et cetera, to attract insects of
Speaker 1: its own accord. And finally, these types of studies highlight
Speaker 1: how systematic field research can lead to answers you weren't expecting,
Speaker 1: or indeed weren't even attempting to find. One of the
Speaker 1: studies that contributed to this knowledge wasn't even looking at
Speaker 1: orchidmantises specifically, but at mantis taxonomic classification in general. They
Speaker 1: were hoping to reclassify some different mantis species to better
Speaker 1: align with their actual evolutionary history. But when they started
Speaker 1: to notice this pattern in orchidmantis evolution, favoring larger, more
Speaker 1: colorful females that could catch bigger prey, they honed in. Oh.
Speaker 1: Once again, animals prove that we can't always predict why
Speaker 1: they do what they do or look how they look.
Speaker 1: Mother Nature continues to surprise us in beautiful and deadly ways,
Speaker 1: perhaps especially if you're a bug. Today's episode is based
Speaker 1: on the article the orchidmantis looks like a flower, it
Speaker 1: stings like a Bee on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by
Speaker 1: Alison Troutner. A brain Stuff is production by Heart Radio
Speaker 1: in partnership with hostuffworks dot Com and is produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Klang. But four more podcasts from my heart Radio.
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