The pictures of leaf insects below come from a cool science story in the New York Times about this fabulous family of fantastic mimics (Phylliidae). The story has a lovely twist, as the females look like leaves while the males look like sticks, and for many years scientists thought the sexes were members of different species. In fact, they were named as different species. There’s one clue that something’s amiss, though: you shouldn’t find that every individual of your species is a female—or a male.
There are only three ways to identify such different-looking sexes as members of the same species. First, you can catch a male and female in copulo. That isn’t on for these species, as the sexes are both hard to see—so cryptic that some experts on the group have never seen a living individual in the wild.
Second, you can look at the DNA, for males and females should have virtually identical DNA—much more similar than the DNA of different species, even closely-related ones.
Third, you can do what was done in this case: rear a clutch of eggs in the lab, and discover that from that clutch both sexes, having drastically different appearances, emerge. And that’s how they identified the conspecific males and females in this case. Do read the story at the link above.
For our purposes today, you can see the preciseness of female mimicry by looking at the photo below. It contains nine leaf insects. Your task, which isn’t easy, is to find them all.
The reveal will be at 3 pm Chicago time. (The photo is by Hsin-hsiung Chen.) Click the photo to enlarge and make hunting easier.
Just to show you what these marvelous mimics look like, here’s a close-up of one (caption from the NYT article):
h/t: Jean
