SearchResearch Challenge (3/6/25): Mimicry in plants?
Dan Russell
Thursday, March 6, 2025
SearchResearch Challenge (3/6/25): Mimicry in plants?
We’ll return to Deep Research next time...
But for this week, we’ll do a “traditional” SRS Challenge–one that asks a question about the world, leading to a surprising result.
If you’ve been reading SearchResearch for a while you know I’ve got several topics that seem to recur–Egypt is one, fish is another… but another repeating topic is mimicry.
As you know, mimicry is the ability of a plant or animal to disguise itself as another plant or animal. Sometimes you see plants looking like insects as we see in the above images. Here, a Bee orchid (Ophrys apifera) looks enough like a female bumblebee that males get confused. They try to mate with the floral fake (so-called pseudo-copulation) and get pollen all over their nether regions. An enthusiastic bumblebee then distributes pollen widely in the area.
And you probably also know about some insects that mimic plants:
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| A leaf insect pretending to be a vegetable. P/C Wikipedia. |
In these virtual pages we’ve talked about mussels mimicking fish, flies mimicking spiders, and fish mimicking their environment. The list goes on and on.
But I wonder… can a plant mimic another plant? That seems unlikely… how would it manage such a trick?
1. Can a plan mimic another plant? Can you find an example of one plant that does this?
2. How does the mimicking plant come to be a mimic? What’s the mechanism by which Plant A comes to look like Plant B?
As always, let us know HOW you found the answers by leaving a comment in the blog.
Keep searching!
