A flower that waits
In the forests of Borneo, some flowers are not flowers. This one had legs. The orchid mantis is the most famous disguise artist in the insect world, and seeing one in person is almost surreal: broad, petal-like lobes on its legs, soft pastel colours, and a body that reads as a bloom right up until it moves.
This is Hymenopus coronatus, the orchid mantis, a member of the flower mantis family Hymenopodidae. It is found in the rainforests of Southeast Asia, where it sits among flowers and ambushes the pollinators that come to visit them. Butterflies, bees and flies that stop for nectar can find themselves stopped permanently.
The camouflage is extraordinary, but there is a quiet irony to it: recent genomic work on mantises (2025) has shown that the orchid mantis and the dead-leaf mantises of the genus Deroplatys are close relatives, despite looking almost nothing alike. Evolution dressed two cousins in completely different costumes.
Sexual dimorphism here is extreme: females can be several times larger than males, and the smaller males are far plainer, lacking the petal-like lobes that make females so spectacular. To photograph one in the wild, in its element, is to understand why people travel halfway around the world for a single insect.
