A whiff of rotting flesh, the flash of a painted eye, a dead-faint to the floor: Nature is full of cunning survival tricks, says Laura Parker, as she explores the greatest mimics and frauds you'll find among the animals, insects, plants and birds of Britain.
The stinkhorn, a fungus with a Latin name that tells you everything you need to know about its shape — Phallus impudicus (‘shameless phallus’) — is not all it seems. It’s not even what you think it seems. It uses mimicry to survive and replicate, but not in the visual way that led male members of Victorian society reputedly to cudgel it down, lest passing ladies should require the smelling salts. (Charles Darwin’s daughter Etty enjoyed a game of seeking out stinkhorns, but felt she had to burn them secretly ‘because of the morals’ of her maidservants.)
The stinkhorn’s most effective mimicry comes from what it smells like — rotting flesh. This attracts blowflies and other insects to feed on its thick, spore-laden slime. They duly fly away and disseminate its undigested spores. Mission accomplished.
Common stinkhorn (Phallus impudicus) has a truly uncommon smell… as well as its, er, unusual shape.
The saucy saprophyte — a fungus that lives on decaying matter — is far from the only living thing to use fakery to trick another species. This type of deception is as widespread in Nature as the stinkhorn hopes its spores will be.
The cuckoo pint (Arum maculatum), another plant with phallic characteristics and a common sight in spring, also disperses carrion-like odours over a wide area, by elevating its temperature. This attracts unwary insects, such as the owl midge, which slides helplessly down its slippery inner surface to be caught by a ring of tiny, spiny hairs and dusted with pollen before being allowed to escape. The round-fruited collar-moss (Splachnum sphaericum) sends out rotting-meat odours, too, to attract flies, a bold pretence for a plant that grows only on dung.
The cuckoo pint, or Arum maculatum.
More fragrant in the world of insect pollination are flowers that attract bugs by pretending to be insects. The bee orchid (Ophrys apifera) is perhaps the most familiar, with its large lower petal or labellum that looks like a female bee or wasp. The shape, together with a distinctive odour, attracts male solitary bees, which attempt to mate with it. In the course of this fruitless congress, they collect pollen and so transmit it when they try another fake female. It is effective, but perhaps unnecessary — experts at Kew’s Royal Botanic Gardens point out that in the UK, the bee orchid is, in fact, self-pollinating and so can manage fine by itself, thank you very much.
These aren’t the bees you’re looking for: the bee orchid is extraordinarily good at looking as if its covered in female bees.
The fly orchid (Ophrys insectifera) is less common here, yet uses the same visual technique. There are dents on its dark-coloured, narrow-lobed labellum known as pseudo eyes, together with a glistening, iridescent wing-like patch, all adding up to a very convincing lady digger wasp.
Mimicry in Nature occurs when a plant or animal gains something by employing the signals sought out by another. It’s a three-way strategy involving the mimic, in this case, the orchid; its model, here the female wasp; and the signal-receiver, the male wasp. There are fine distinctions between types of mimicry — for example, those fakes that offer their deceived a reward and those that do not. Camouflage is a different, perhaps simpler, level of deception and is about blending in with an inanimate background. Mimics, on the other hand, can be quite conspicuous.
Why pretend? One of Nature’s key motivators is reproduction, as illustrated by these fungi and flower examples where the pretence is all about procreation. There are some cases where mimicry is instead used to avoid copulation. The female common hawker dragonfly (Aeshna juncea), finding herself plagued with males attempting to jump on her, even after she has successfully mated and laid eggs, will pretend to be dead. It works, on the whole — about 60% of the females escape.
Common Hawker dragonflies (Aeshna juncea) are fooled by the females playing dead.
The death feint, also known as thanatosis, is also practised by the female European common frog (Rana temporaria), which faces actual fatality if too many eager males end up clinging to her.
Some creatures dissemble to avoid being dispatched. Chickens and rabbits can enter a state of tonic immobility, a motionless posture practised by the American opossum — hence the term ‘playing possum’ — to persuade predators to seek a fresher dinner elsewhere. Ducks decoy their demise to dupe foxes taking them back to their earths with a plan to eat them later. Experienced foxes know to kill the ducks immediately. Many insects pretend to expire when threatened, falling to the ground and tucking in their legs, even when prodded or poked by a predator. Beetles are particularly good at this: Darwin noted one that faked death for 23 minutes.
Keep calm and stay still: beetles can play dead very successfully.
Dodging being eaten is an extremely good reason to adopt mimicking tactics. In 1848, explorer Henry Bates discovered that one type of butterfly would copy the colouration of another, toxic one to avoid predation. Among his many achievements during an 11-year stint in Brazil — which included documenting 8,000 species for the first time and sending back his 14,000-strong collection to the Natural History Museum in London — he gave his name to this type of mimicry.
We can see Batesian mimicry closer to home with the hoverfly, an insect that bears no sting, but which imitates the colouration of wasps and bees to fool bird predators into avoiding it. ‘Be aware that any insect with yellow and black stripes might not be all it seems,’ warns Mike Wheeler from the School of Science and the Environment at the University of Worcester.
He names two other UK species that adopt the tell-tale strip: the wasp beetle (Clytus arietis), with its black body and yellow stripes, and the hornet clearwing moth (Sesia apiformis), which can be found near poplar trees in May. ‘The moth is completely harmless, but closely resembles the shape and warning pattern of a hornet, which, of course, is venomous,’ Dr Wheeler confirms.
Do not adjust your laptop: this really is a moth rather than a wasp. The hornet moth, or hornet clearwing, (Sesia apiformis) is one of Nature’s finest mimics.
With their short lifespan, butterflies need to adopt every survival tactic possible and several harness their flamboyance. Perhaps these were what 19th-century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace had in mind when he noted that some creatures can ‘appear like actors or masqueraders dressed up and painted for amusement, or like swindlers endeavouring to pass themselves off for well-known or respectable members of society’.
A quick flash and a flutter of a peacock butterfly’s (Aglais io) black-rimmed ‘eyes’, with their realistically streaked blue irises, is enough to confound a predator and make it withdraw. The comma butterfly’s (Polygonia c-album) ragged wings help it to masquerade as a leaf, but its disguise starts even earlier — its larvae resemble bird droppings. These mimicking tactics allow it to hibernate in more open habitats than, for example, the small tortoiseshell (Aglais urticae) and peacock butterflies, which seek out dark, sheltered places.
A Comma Butterfly, Polygonia c-album, feeding on a blackberry.
Adaptability is key in the insect world. The green shield bug (Palomena prasina) follows the seasons and its surroundings by changing from bright green in the summer to a brown or bronze in the autumn, as it prepares for hibernation.
Other swindlers lurk below the surface and adopt a combination of inconspicuousness and cunning. Low and flat with a large head, the anglerfish is adept at altering its appearance so it can blend into the seabed. The female has a long, luminescent fin that it waves above its head to draw in and devour small fish and squid, which mistake the lure for a worm.
An Anglerfish (lophius piscatorius) off the coast of Devon.
In addition to appearance and scent, there is, of course, mimicry using sound. Last spring, police officer Simon Hills was surprised to hear a continuous two-tone sound coming from over the road in Bicester, Oxfordshire. Believing that one of his squad cars’ sirens had a faulty battery, he investigated, only to find that the noise was emanating from a fluting blackbird (Turdus merula) at the top of a tree. The local wildlife trust confirmed it was a territorial male.
Birds of all kinds will use vocal imitation, expanding their repertoire to impress potential mates and deter territory-invaders. Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris), our most talented mimics, can duplicate sounds from a hawk to a telephone’s ring. Sneakiest of all is the baby cuckoo (Cuculus canorus), which fools its host mother — typically a meadow pipit (Anthus pratensis), reed warbler (Acrocephalus scirpaceus) or dunnock (Prunella modularis) — into feeding it, even when it is twice her size, by reproducing the begging call of her nestlings. It manages to sound like not one chick alone, but her entire brood, most of which it will have already pushed out of the nest. As politicians and Spitting Image targets have found out, mimicry can be cruel.
A reed warbler feeding a fledged cuckoo chick with a dragonfly — tiny foster parents keep feeding the cuckoos, even when they’ve witnessed them ejecting their foster-siblings from the nest.
Six of the best mimics in nature around the world
- The Indonesian mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus) can assume the appearance of jellyfish, crabs, sea snakes, shrimps and lionfish to save itself from attack.
- Some stick insects can take on the shapes of leaves and sway back and forth to imitate being rustled by the wind, saving them from being predated, as well as helping them to ambush their prey.
- A researcher in Italy was surprised to find a greater mouse-eared bat (Myotis myotis) buzzing like a hornet — a rare instance of a mammal imitating an insect. Experiments indicated that this sound would deter its predator, the barn owl (Tyto alba). It was not clear whether it was the insect noise or the volume. Either way, it worked for the bat.
- The bluestriped fangblenny (Plagiotremus rhinorhynchos) is a small, elongated fish that lives in Indian Ocean coral reefs and specialises in impersonating a fish that cleans parasites from larger fish. This allows the fangblenny to approach the host and take a bite.
- In 2012, a margay or tree ocelot (Leopardus wiedii) was observed in Brazil imitating the call of a baby pied tamarin monkey (Saguinus bicolor). Some of the adult monkeys rushing to its aid realised the ruse and alerted those who had strayed closer to the wild cat.
- In 2019, researchers in Northern Peru found a species of tiny praying mantis that, far from being inconspicuous — mantises change colour to blend into the environment — was brightly coloured. It was a wasp mimic.
