Is it a flower or an insect?!

@john1 says to be careful when picking flowers for your spells.

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Okay, yeah. I can’t watch this. This is gonna freak me out. I can feel it! :scream:

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Oh! How beautiful! Thank you @john1 and @Mystique!

Yes, @Amethyst, it is a bit disturbing. Beautiful nonetheless. Can I bring one home as a pet?

From the mountains of Poland…

These bugs are beautiful! Some are of the mantis family, which means the flower attracts bugs for it to eat.

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That is cool! It would be a hoot to have a few in the yard.

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I told @john1 that they reminded me of a Venus flytrap.

@dan3 i wonder if they would ship us some from Poland? Lol

@Amethyst at first I thought it was a strange flower. Then realized it was a bug. I think they are beautiful.

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Nope, I’m noping out. You let one in and soon it’s a whole Audrey II situation going on.

Some bugs freak me out, like a preying mantis or walking stick. Flower bugs? :face_with_peeking_eye: Nope. Not for me! LOL!

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The videos are wild and fun to see, and I don’t want to take away from harmless fun, but I’m not quite sure if the bugs they’re depicting are real. I ran a search for ‘ambulaflos rubra’, and got nothing but this video and TikToks. A search on the web reveals that there is no genus ‘ambulaflos’ and the species ‘rubra’ refers to a type of oak tree.

As someone who lived in Poland I had to check on this - that is one crazy bug! :laughing:

Again, the scientific names they’re using in the video, while they sound legitimate, appear to be made up. I can’t find any legitimate genus ‘florambulis’, and while there are a few results for species ‘marginata’, they are for a beetle and a tortoise.

Additionally, I’m sorry to say it, but the videos from thedailyguardian look very strongly like AI generated videos. It looks like the site ‘The Daily Guardian’ is under scrunity for making fake news.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying fun videos! The bugs are really cool to see. It’s just more important than ever to consume online content with a critical eye - more and more things that appear real online, be it videos, pictures, or news, are AI-generated and not authentic.

Enjoy, but stay aware! :heart:

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I was thinking about this. With as long as we’ve had the internet, if it were legit, there would be a lot more pics… Unless this were a brand new species, harbinger of some vast change in species. There would have to be at least two of each so they could multiply. Besides, how would one survive in snow: there would be so little to eat!

AI is getting tricky if they can make imagination look so real! Pandora becomes ever closer.

What was it Molly Granger said? Beware of anything if you can’t see where it holds its brain? On the first, I saw no eyes, no mouth parts, and nowhere to hold its brain. Not to mention the beatle glowed from the inside when it opened!

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True this! Some of the earlier AI models made it really obvious the videos were made with generative AI - there were legs and details flying all over the place. It was sometimes comical and other times pretty horrifying to see haha. Either way, there was no way to mistake it as real.

But newer models are very impressive with what they can do. I’m no expert on telling them apart, so now the only way I can be sure is by checking for secondary sources. It makes me feel like I’m back in university writing a research paper, but I’m just trying to enjoy fun videos online :laughing:

A good quote! It seems like you have a good eye for detail, too. That - and listening to our intuitions - will be helpful for us all in the coming days as AI content becomes more and more common.

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re: the videos from thedailyguardian look very strongly like AI generated videos.

Say it ain’t so, Joe!

i want that to be real… Of course, that was the point of the fake video.

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I don’t know about holding the beatle, but I’d definitely hold the mantises! I’d enjoy learning more about them. And yes, I’d enjoy seeing them around me. The first one… Well that one would be upsetting at first. Wouldn’t want it walking on me until I knew more about it. Knowing me, I’d stick my nose in a bug and get bit! :rofl:

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Many of the comments in this particular video say it’s AI-generated. The way the legs move isn’t right, too uncanny. My vote is that this isn’t a real creature. Pretty though it might be!

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I watched it several times and came to the conclusion it’s beautiful, but not real.

Let’s face it, if this were a real thing, there would be hundreds of photos and videos of it all over the place, but it seems to only be in the Daily Guardian article, TicToc, YouTube and Threads.

I’m voting AI.

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This may help with the mystery

https://animals.howstuffworks.com/insects/orchid-mantis.htm#:~:text=The%20orchid%20mantis%20(Hymenopus%20coronatus,thanks%20to%20its%20striking%20looks.

The above link mentions the orchard mantis and if you scroll down, the pink one is there too. I keyed in pink shade seraph mantis (according to the original post) and I found the above which seems the closest match in the natural world.

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I think we’re talking about two different things at this point.

Yes, there absolutely is such a thing as an orchid mantis, and it is gorgeous! It’s incredible to think they evolved to mimic orchid flowers :astonished_face:

Ambulaflos rubra is not a real scientific name and the insect in the video is AI-created.

I think that’s what makes these videos dangerous, there is just enough real info (like the orchid mantis) scattered here (that happens to be unrelated) that it makes it all seem believable.

And just to add the whole fun part back…

Here is an orchid that’s evolved to look like a female bee to attract pollinators.


(Source)

More of the female orchid mantis, sadly, the male isn’t as pretty as she is.

(Source)

And I’m done meddling here :laughing:

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@Artemisia i had questioned the validity of the insect myself but still thought it was pretty cool to watch. Thank you for sharing the information with us! :purple_heart:. And you weren’t meddling, you are giving us accurate information which is always nice to have. :people_hugging:

@dan3 I’m with you! I was hoping to get a dozen or so shipped! Lol

@tracyS that orchid mantis is beautiful! Maybe I could get a dozen of those instead! Lol

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As long as they don’t eat each other, send me a dozen of each! :smiley:

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