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: 

 

Leaf insect. 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!