We see a lot of incredible cases of mimicry in nature, which is when an organism is trying to mimic another organism. I have written about Batesian Mimicry in the past, and you can read about it [by clicking here](https://steemit.com/biology/@valth/some-harmless-animal-species-imitate-the-warning-signs-of-harmful-species-to-scare-predators-amazing-animal-adaptations-7). Anyway, this post is not about Batesian mimicry, it is about the mimicry of a plant that is trying to look like it has a mushroom inside its flower. 

The flower we are talking about is called *Aristolochia arborea*, and is a tropic plant species that is found in Central America, mostly in Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador. It belongs to the order *Piperales*, where we also find plants such as the pepper plant (*Piper nigrum*). The *A. arborea* is sometimes called **Aristolochia Tree**, but this name is not that well known, so most people who talk about this plant uses its Latin name. 

*A. arborea* is a relatively small plant, only reaching to a height of 5-6m. It has a corky bark, with flowers appearing in clusters at the very base of the plant. It used to be pretty common, but deforestation has lead to it being kind of rare to find in the wild these days, but it is also found cultivated in many places around the world. 

As you can see on the image below, the flowers grow out from the stem, and are not connected to the leaves, which are found higher up on the plant. 

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Aristolochia_arborea_04.jpg
*The cluster of flowers of the A. arborea plant. [Image by Michael Wolf, posted with the GNU Free Documentation License](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aristolochia_arborea_04.jpg)*.

What is really interesting about this plant is that part of its flower is mimicked to look like a mushroom. The “mushroom” is closely resembling fungi from the order *Marasmius*, and the theory behind this is that the mushroom is trying to attract flies from the family *Sciaridae*, more commonly known as fungus gnats. These are all very small flies that feed on fungus, so scientists think that the plant is trying to trick the fungus gnats into visiting the plant, and carry its pollen when it travels away after realizing that the flower is not actually a mushroom. 

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Aristolochia_arborea_06.jpg
*Here is a close-up photo of the flower, and you can clearly see the resemblance to a mushroom. [Image by Mirosch01, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aristolochia_arborea_06.jpg)*. 

Learning more about this plant proved to be kind of difficult, and there are few good sources online. It seems that there is still a high demand for more research on this plant if we want to understand the reason for its mushroom mimicry, such as finding out if the theory about the fungus gnats is actually true, and if it is, which species that are visiting it. For all we know, there might be a completely different reason why it mimics a mushroom on its flowers. 

## Thanks for reading
Thank you for taking the time to read my post about the *A. arborea* plant that mimics a mushroom. I hope you found this post cool, because I know I did when I first read about this plant! 

## About the author
Hi, I’m @valth! I live in Norway with my girlfriend, our newborn son, and our two dogs, one of which is seen wearing a bow tie in the profile picture! 

I am very passionate about nature and biology, and have been studying ecology for a few years now. My passions are mostly within conservation biology, mycology (the studies of mushrooms), animal behavior and general microbiology. I really enjoy both the theoretical aspect, as well as the more practical aspect of biology, and I spend about as much time in front of biology textbooks as I do spend on finding and identifying plant, mushroom and animal species in the forests. 

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