This Strange Plant Has Flowers with Petals Shaped Like Hummingbirds

The Internet is full of wonders, from memes to stunning photographs, an endless ocean of tweets to political manifestos. People are free to share pretty about anything, and while some exploit this freedom to spread information that they should definitely keep private, others occasionally release information that completely enthralls the internet community.

When Redditor Octopus Prime posted this photo of an unusual looking plant, the internet caught fire. In the palm of someone’s hand, what appears to be an origami hummingbird is actually a flower.

The author commented, “Check out these beautiful flowers that look like tiny hummingbirds!” and, boy, did people check them out!

Instantly, everyone was wondering where this plant came from and what benefit it received from looking like a bird. Fortunately, SolitaryBee, a post-doctoral researcher who studies floral evolution on Reddit, was able to provide some clarification.

The plant in question is known as the green flowerbird or regal flowerbird. Crotalaria cunninghamii is the stunning plant’s scientific name.It belongs to the same family as alfalfa and chickpeas as legumes. The perennial shrub is indigenous to northern Australia’s interior, where it grows well next to sand dunes. Given that hummingbirds don’t exist in Australia, its ties to that country are extremely ironic.

Many commenters associated the flowers’ shape with an adaptive evolutionary development. But, as SolitaryBee helpfully pointed out, this couldn’t possibly be the case. “The fact that the flower looks like a bird to humans cannot have evolved adaptively because as a signal receiver, there is nothing humans could have done to increase the fitness of individuals that evolved this signal (to look like a bird),”  the scientist commented. “Unless indigenous Australians in arid Australia bred or traded the plant because it looks like a bird.”