The world of flora and fauna turns out to have its own uniqueness in maintaining its habitat in nature. Plants need insects for pollination and vice versa, insects also use plants to get prey.
Quoted from Live Science, many insects imitate plants to survive to escape from predators, as well as to get prey.
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However, the grasshopper orchid has a full camouflage resembling a flower, complete with legs shaped like petals. This advantage is not only used to hide from prey, but also to attract victims.
Orchid grasshopper as an aggressive imitator was first written by naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in the 1800s. However, Wallace’s idea has never been confirmed because of the difficulty of finding the orchid locust in its natural habitat, the rainforests of Southeast Asia.
“The idea that locust orchids mimic flowers first appeared more than a century ago, but it’s just an idea – no one has done any experiments to test whether that’s really the case,” said study lead author James O’Hanlon, an evolutionary biologist. at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
To test the idea, the scientists conducted a study in the jungles of Malaysia. The researchers first confirmed that the locust orchid’s coloration was indistinguishable from the 13 wildflower species in the area where the predator lived.
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