This Pink Bug Is Not A “Rare Freak Mutant” After All

On March 27, 2025, somewhere in the Panamanian rainforest, the evolutionary biologist Zeke Rowe was looking for a snack. While walking outside the research station's cafeteria, Rowe noticed a strange insect summoned by a floodlight. The insect was a katydid, a close relative of crickets famous for their mimicry of leaves. Katydids have veined bodies that are often bright green like a new leaf or stippled brown like a fallen leaf. But this particular katydid was a seemingly unnatural neon pink. Rowe, who studies leaf mimicry in moths, brought the pink katydid to the office of his colleague Benito Wainwright, an evolutionary biologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

"I was extremely excited," Wainwright wrote in an email. For the last two years, Wainwright has exclusively studied such katydids and how they evolved their leafy masquerade. But he'd never seen a pink katydid before. When he dug into the literature, he saw that pink katydids had been previously documented in scientific literature, albeit not in this particular species, Arota festae. But most of these papers were more than a century old and made no mention that the pink coloration could offer any advantage to the insects. Instead, "these individuals had been regarded as rare freak mutants that are disadvantaged by their conspicuous appearance," Wainright said.

Rare freak mutant or absolute diva?