A smell of rotting flesh, the flash of a painted eye, a swoon to the floor: Nature is full of cunning survival tricks, says Laura Parker, as she explores the biggest mimics and deceptions you can find among the animals, insects, plants and birds of Britain.

The stinkhorn, a mushroom 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 to male members of Victorian society being said to cower it down, so that passing ladies wouldn’t need the smelling salts. (Charles Darwin’s daughter Etty enjoyed a game of looking for stinkhorns, but felt she had to burn them secretly “because of the morals” of her maids.)

The skunk’s most effective mimicry comes from what it smells like – rotting flesh. This attracts blowflies and other insects to feed on its thick, spore-filled mucus. They duly fly away, spreading its undigested spores. Mission accomplished.

Common Stinkhorn (Phallus impudicus) has a truly unusual smell … as well as its unusual shape.

The cheeky saprophyte – a fungus that lives on decaying matter – is far from the only living thing that uses fakery to trick another species. This type of deception is as widespread in nature as the stinkhorn hopes its spores to be.

The cuckoo pint (Arum maculatum), another plant with phallic properties and a common sight in spring, also spreads corpse-like odors over a large area by raising its temperature. This attracts unwary insects, such as the owl fly, which helplessly slide down its slippery inner surface to be caught by a ring of tiny, spiny hairs and dusted with pollen before escaping. The round-fruited collard moss (Spachnum sphaericum) also emits rotting flesh odors to attract flies, a bold feat for a plant that only grows on dung.

The cuckoo pint, or Arum maculatum.

More fragrant in the world of insect pollination are flowers that attract insects by pretending to be insects. the bio orchid (Ophrys apifera) is perhaps the most familiar, with its large lower petal or labellum that looks like a honey bee or wasp. The shape, along with a distinct smell, attracts solitary male bees, who try to mate with it. During this fruitless congress, they collect pollen and transfer it when they try another false female. It’s effective, but perhaps unnecessary – experts at Kew’s Royal Botanic Gardens point out that in the UK the bio orchid is actually self-pollinating and can therefore do well on its own, thank you very much.

These aren’t the bees you’re looking for: the bio orchid is exceptionally good at looking like it’s covered in queens.

The flying orchid (Ophrys insectifera) is less common here, but still uses the same visual technique. There are dents on its dark-colored, narrow-lobed labellum, known as pseudo-eyes, along with a glittering, iridescent wing-like spot, all adding up to a very convincing lady digger wasp.

Mimicry in nature occurs when a plant or animal gains something by using the signals that another is seeking. 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 differences between types of mimicry – for example, those fakes that offer their duped a reward and those that don’t. Camouflage is another, perhaps simpler, level of deception and involves blending into an inanimate background. Mimicry, on the other hand, can be quite conspicuous.

Why pretend? One of nature’s main driving forces is reproduction, as illustrated by these mushroom and flower examples where the show is all about reproduction. There are some cases where mimicry is instead used to avoid mating. The Female Dragonfly (Aeshna juncea), finding herself plagued by males trying to jump on her, even after she has successfully mated and laid eggs, will pretend to be dead. It generally works — about 60% of females escape.

Common Hawker dragonflies (Aeshna juncea) are fooled by the females playing dead.

The death feint, also known as thanatos, is also performed by the female European frog (Rana temporaria), who is in danger of dying if too many eager men stop clinging to her.

Some creatures are dismounted to avoid being dispatched. Chickens and rabbits can enter a state of tonic immobility, a motionless posture practiced by the American opossum – hence the term “playing possum” – to persuade predators to seek a fresher dinner elsewhere. Ducks lure their deaths to trick foxes who take them back to their fields with a plan to eat them later. Experienced foxes know to kill the ducks immediately. Many insects feign lunging when threatened, falling to the ground and tucking their legs in, even when pushed or poked by a predator. Beetles are particularly good at this: Darwin recorded one that faked death for 23 minutes.

Keep calm and stay still: beetles can play dead very successfully.

Avoiding being eaten is an extremely good reason to adopt mimic tactics. In 1848, explorer Henry Bates discovered that one type of butterfly would copy the color of another, poisonous, to avoid predation. Among his many achievements during an 11-year stay in Brazil – which included documenting 8,000 species for the first time and sending his 14,000-strong collection back 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 carries no sting, but imitates the coloration of wasps and bees to trick avian predators into avoiding it. “Be aware that all insects with yellow and black stripes may not be all that they seem,” warns Mike Wheeler from the School of Science and the Environment at the University of Worcester.

He names two other British species that adopt the control strip: the wasp beetle (Clytus arietis), with its black body and yellow stripes, and the hornet butterfly (Sesia apiformis), which can be found near poplar trees in May. “The butterfly is completely harmless, but resembles the shape and warning pattern of a hornet, which is of course poisonous,” confirms Dr Wheeler.

Don’t adjust your laptop: this is really a moth rather than a wasp. The hornet butterfly, or hornet butterfly, (Sesia apiformis) is one of nature’s finest mimics.

With their short lifespans, butterflies must adopt all sorts of survival tactics and many take advantage of their flamboyance. Perhaps this is what the 19th-century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace had in mind when he noted that some creatures may “appear as actors or masqueraders dressed up and painted for amusement, or as impostors who endeavor to impersonate well-known or respectable members in society’.

A quick flash and a flutter of a peacock butterfly (Aglais io) black-rimmed ‘eyes’, with their realistically streaked blue irises, are enough to confuse a predator and make it retreat. comma butterfly’s (Polygonia c album) broken wings help it disguise itself as a leaf, but its disguise begins even earlier – its larvae resemble bird droppings. These mimic tactics allow it to overwinter in more open habitats than, for example, the small tortoise (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 turning from light green in the summer to brown or bronze in the fall, as it prepares for hibernation.

Other scammers lurk beneath the surface, adopting a combination of stealth and cunning. Low and flat with a large head, the monkfish is adept at changing its appearance so that it can blend into the seabed. The female has a long, luminous fin that she waves above her head to draw in and devour small fish and squid, which mistake the cover for a worm.

A monkfish (lophius piscatorius) off the coast of Devon.

In addition to appearance and smell, there is of course mimicry with the help of sound. Last spring, police officer Simon Hills was surprised to hear a continuous two-tone sound coming from the road in Bicester, Oxfordshire. Believing that one of his squad car’s sirens had a faulty battery, he investigated, only to find that the sound was coming from a ridged 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 intruders. Stars (Sturnus vulgaris), our most talented mimics, can duplicate the sounds of a hawk into a phone’s ringtone. The sneakiest of all is the cuckoo (Cuculus canorus), which deceives its host mother – usually a meadow pipit (Anthus pratensis), pipe singer (Acrocephalus scirpaceus) or dunock (Prunella modularis) — to feed it, even when twice its size, by recreating the begging of her young. It manages to sound like not a single chick, but her entire brood, most of which have already fled the nest. As a politician and Spit image targets have found out, mimicry can be cruel.

A piping plover feeding a flying cuckoo chick with a dragonfly — young foster parents continue to feed the cuckoo, even when they’ve seen them kick their foster siblings out of 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 escape attack.
• Some stick insects can take the shape of leaves and sway back and forth to imitate being rustled by the wind, saving them from becoming obsolete, as well as helping them ambush their prey.
• A researcher in Italy was surprised to find a larger bat with ears (Myotis myotis) buzzing like a hornet — a rare example of a mammal imitating an insect. Experiments showed that this sound would deter its predator, the barn owl (Tyto alba). It wasn’t clear if it was the insect noise or the volume. Regardless, it worked for the bat.
• The blue-striped fangblenny (Plagiotremus rhinorhynchos) is a small, elongated fish that lives in the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean and specializes in imitating a fish that scavenges 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 who rushed to its aid realized the ruse and warned those who had strayed closer to the wild cat.
• In 2019, researchers in northern Peru found a species of small praying mantis that, far from being inconspicuous – praying mantises change color to blend in with their environment – were brightly colored. It was a wasp mimic.