Sexually deceiving plants

[jasonhernandez74]

@DanielAustin

This doesn’t happen because those insects can see the species they want to mimic. No matter how well they can see another species, nor how hard they concentrated on wanting to look like that, they could never start to mimic the other creature even over millions of generations.

What really used to confuse me was insects that mimic plants – e.g., this katydid species looks like a leaf, that katydid species looks like a lichen. I wondered, how do they know what they look like? How does the leaf-mimic katydid know that it looks like a leaf, and how does the lichen-mimic katydid know that it looks like a lichen? The explanation I was given is that they don’t – the leaf-mimic katydid doesn’t know that it looks like a leaf; it just has an instinct for staying among leaves, which evolved in the same way and over the same span of time as its leaf-like appearance did.