This week we leave the rainforests and pyramids of Belize, where we met delectable termites, pretty peacock butterflies, painful scorpions, and tiny false scorpions, and enormous elephant beetles, to meet a mistress of disguise and deception, the beautiful orchid mantis. One early explorer described an incredible flower able to capture and consume small insects that stopped in for a visit. This case of mistaken identity is a testament to the marvelous color and morphology of the orchid mantis, which gives it a striking resemblance to a tropical blossom.
Who is that masquerading as part of an orchid blossom?
The evolution of insects to mimic the shape, color, and movement of plant parts has been witnessed in other episodes of Bug of the Week, where we visited walking sticks from Vietnam and spiny leaf insects from Australia. Resembling a plant part is a clever ruse believed to have evolved in many insects to escape the hungry eyes of vertebrate predators with a taste for insects. This form of deception is called masquerade, resembling an inedible object to fool an enemy. However, the uncanny resemblance of the orchid mantis to a blossom takes the art of deception one step further.
Hiding in plain sight, an orchid mantis masquerades as part of a blossom. Unsuspecting pollinators like wasps and bees will be attracted to the flower and the mantis in their quest to get nectar and pollen. Mantises are sit-and-wait predators and most of their time is spent motionless, with occasional interruptions to groom their raptorial, prey-catching legs. So beautiful and so deadly.
While resembling a flower may serve as a dodge to a meat-hungry predator, it has long been thought that by resembling a blossom the orchid mantis may lure hopeful pollinators close enough to be trapped in the deadly embrace of the mantis’s spiny forelegs. This form of mimicry has been called aggressive mimicry.
Wicked spines on the foreleg of the orchid mantis are used to capture prey.
A brilliant study by James C. O’Hanlon and his colleagues tested the notion that the orchid mantis could indeed attract pollinators, dooming them to wind up in the belly of this fierce and beautiful predator. First off, they demonstrated that the chromatic profile of the mantis was an “indistinguishable” match for a variety of flowers visited by bees and wasps in the area where mantises, blossoms, and pollinators co-occurred. Then, by placing mantises on naked vertical sticks, that is a stick with no flowers, they discovered pollinators did indeed visit the mantises and fall victim to their lightning strikes and sharp jaws. So good was the deception that the solitary mantises attracted pollinators at a higher rate than the actual flowers nearby.
Expanded legs resembling flower petals and wings tinted like fading leaves help the orchid mantis pose as part of a blossom.
Feeling a bit sorry for the pollinators and stealing a line from K.N. Lee in War of the Dragons, I wonder “How could something so beautiful be so deadly.”
Acknowledgements
We thank Todd Waters for maintaining the Insect Petting Zoo at the University of Maryland and thereby providing the inspiration for this week’s episode. The fascinating article, “Pollinator Deception in the Orchid Mantis” by James C. O’Hanlon, Gregory I. Holwell, and Marie E. Herberstein provided great insights into the clever mimicry of the orchid mantis.