Uploaded May 2024 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Visit patreon.com/statedclearly to support my work and see videos early.
The pink orchid praying mantis, Hymenopus coronatus, is one of the most striking examples of aggressive mimicry on earth! To understand how it evolved, it helps to understand the diversity of mantis species, and the types of selection pressures they're under as they hunt while avoiding being hunted.
In this short, I give a very simple outline of one of several possible routes to the evolution of orchid mantises from more typical ancestors. Early members of the lineage may have started down their trajectory due to an albino mutation. This is not mere conjecture, but is based on field observations showing that, even though their closest relatives are often deep yellow or green, H. coronatus is most often white, or pink/purple. On rare occasions they are pale yellow.
Once starting down the flower mimic path, mutations enlarging leg-petal ornamentation could have happened slowly, helping them better trick prey and other predators.
While not mentioned in the short (due to time constraints in YouTube Shorts), details on the specific mutations that allowed the evolution of pink pigment and the gene duplications that led the extreme leg-petal enlargement are now known. For details, see the free paper in Nature: Evolutionary genomics of camouflage innovation in the orchid mantis.
For behavior in the wild, and observed color variations, see: The orchid mantis exhibits high ontogenetic colouration variety and intersexual life history differences (preprint is available for free on researchgate.net)
Visit patreon.com/statedclearly to support my work and see videos early.
The pink orchid praying mantis, Hymenopus coronatus, is one of the most striking examples of aggressive mimicry on earth! To understand how it evolved, it helps to understand the diversity of mantis species, and the types of selection pressures they're under as they hunt while avoiding being hunted.
In this short, I give a very simple outline of one of several possible routes to the evolution of orchid mantises from more typical ancestors. Early members of the lineage may have started down their trajectory due to an albino mutation. This is not mere conjecture, but is based on field observations showing that, even though their closest relatives are often deep yellow or green, H. coronatus is most often white, or pink/purple. On rare occasions they are pale yellow.
Once starting down the flower mimic path, mutations enlarging leg-petal ornamentation could have happened slowly, helping them better trick prey and other predators.
While not mentioned in the short (due to time constraints in YouTube Shorts), details on the specific mutations that allowed the evolution of pink pigment and the gene duplications that led the extreme leg-petal enlargement are now known. For details, see the free paper in Nature: Evolutionary genomics of camouflage innovation in the orchid mantis.
For behavior in the wild, and observed color variations, see: The orchid mantis exhibits high ontogenetic colouration variety and intersexual life history differences (preprint is available for free on researchgate.net)
