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The insect world is indeed replete with examples of mimicry: they can be indistinguishable from tree barks to twigs and moss to lichen to protect themselves or attract prey. Here, an orchid mantis perched on a flower. Picture for representation.
\n | Photo Credit: Nanda Hari Susilo<\/p>\n
When a certain brilliantly-coloured butterfly, found halfway around the globe\u2014from India to Japan\u2014closes its wings, you cannot tell it apart from a dead leaf: the \u2018dead leaf\u2019 butterfly\u2019s wings turn a deeply-veined brown or yellow, ending in a point. And so, when a bird pursues it aerially, the butterfly closes its wings and drops down motionless on to the forest floor, disappearing into the undergrowth and confounding its predator. This butterfly exhibits masterful mimicry to escape predators, as do many insects around the world.<\/p>\n
In Southeast Asia, for instance, the pink-hued, green-eyed \u2018orchid mantis\u2019 (in the picture), with legs that mimic flower petals, is cleverer still: it uses its camouflage to both avoid predators and attract pollinating insects by absorbing UV light as flowers do: it even sways like a flower in the wind.<\/p>\n
The insect world is indeed replete with examples of mimicry: they can be indistinguishable from tree barks to twigs and moss to lichen to protect themselves or attract prey. In May this year, scientists reported an extraordinary rainforest insect that glowed a hot pink in Panama, transforming into green in under two weeks, \u201cperfectly mirroring the life cycle of tropical leaves that emerge pink before maturing,\u201d said their paper.<\/p>\n
The specific mimicry of flowering plants was once thought to date back to 47 million years ago from fossil records. But now, a new paper in\u00a0Insect Science\u00a0records evidence of flowering-plant mimicry farther back to 99 million years ago, when plants were just beginning to morph Earth\u2019s ecological landscape.<\/p>\n