…and incase you don’t believe we’re actually friends, here are 80% of authors together, preaching all things Lep, in a fun video I made with @savebutterflies.bsky.social a few years ago. Nice to see our sentiment validated (and to see my jokes haven’t aged one bit…) youtu.be/AXDXL4CfMw8?...

And lastly, thanks to @royalcom1851.bsky.social for funding and all BCI staff at STRI for their wonderful hospitality! 14/n

Nevertheless, I certainly would not have got very far without the incredible support of Nathan Bailey and Graeme Ruxton, who really helped bring this work to life. Also huge kudos to summer intern student Lotte Rolfe for doing most of the legwork on the predation experiment. 💪🏼13/n

This is my most independent piece of work to date so on a personal level, I’m pretty proud of it. The (synergistic? 😜) blend of methodologies involved is also a nice nod to how I began my research career as a master student, and the amazing mentors I learnt from. 12/n

So then, the co-occurrence of traits with synergistic effects provide a viable mechanism through which exquisitely sophisticated adaptations, such as leaf masquerade, can evolve! 11/n

But most excitingly of all, we found that (controlling for phylogeny) colour and shape are evolutionarily correlated with path analysis suggesting that these leafy traits were acquired simultaneously during the evolution of leaf masquerade in katydids. 10/n

In concordance with our predation experiment, we found that to score highly in the human leafiness rankings, wings needed to be the right colouration AND the right shape. 9/n

Having collected these wings, I designed a survey where 55 human participants had the honour of assigning them a ‘leafiness score’. Pictured on the left is our leafy winner (leafiness score: 9.05), and on the right is our wooden spoon prize (leafiness score: 1.88). Better luck next year mate 😢. 8/n

To answer this, I had to exchange fieldwork in bonnie Scotland for the lush rainforests of Barro Colorado Island, Panama… 🌴 My newfound hobby of katydidling yielded 250+ katydid wings across 58 species, with leafy features having evolved several times independently. 7/n

Given this interdependence, how did colour and shape coevolve to produce the spectacular masquerade we see in real katydids? 🧐🧐 6/n

Lo and behold, prey that were leafy in colour (green) and in shape (oval) were more likely to trick predators than all other colour*shape combinations. This tells us that leaf masquerade relies on a synergistic interaction of its trait components to be functional. 5/n

…And exposed them to wild bird predators in Bonnie Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿❤️4/n

It seems intuitive to suppose that to be a convincing leaf, one must be both leaf-coloured AND leaf-shaped. To test how leaf masquerade actually fools predators, we used advanced skills acquired from playschool to make fake “leafy prey” of different colours and shapes.… ✂️3/n

Complex composite adaptations are everywhere you look, yet explaining their existence from both a functional and evolutionary perspective is no simple task. The dazzling variety of leafy and non-leafy outfits of katydids provides a system in which to tackle these evolutionary questions… 2/n

How about a splash of Scottish North Sea for good measure 🌊