Looks familiar

The bright pink outer petals resemble love hearts.

Skull-shaped seed pods appear after flowering.

These ghostly white parasitic plants grow into the roots of trees to steal food.

The showy flowers look like flying parrots with little green “beaks.”

The helmet-shaped flowers smell like rotting flesh to attract flies.

These fun flowers look like animals and other objects, from birds to love hearts. While most of these similarities are only a coincidence, in some cases, the resemblance has evolved to attract potential pollinators.

Two red petals fan out like a pair of ears from the purple, bat-faced center.

The purple flowers look like little people, complete with arms and legs.

Many of the unique and colorful flowers shown here belong to the orchid family, which consists of thousands of different plants. This includes the naked man orchid, the dancing lady orchid, and the white egret flower. The bee orchid flower, which looks like a female bee, attracts

A bee orchid’s fragrance can

trick a male bee into thinking it is meeting a female.

These masses of pollen stick to the bee’s head, to be transferred to the next flower. The delicate white petals resemble the outstretched wings of a heronlike white bird called an egret.

The red leaflike bracts attract hummingbirds to pollinate the flowers inside.

The pink sepals look like wings, and the flower even has a fuzzy, “hairy” body like a bee.

The duck’s “head” curls down over visiting insects to deposit pollen on them.

The large, ruffled petal of this chocolate-scented flower looks like a dancer’s gown. The labellum, or lip, traps pollinating insects.

male bees, attaching packages of pollen to them in the process. The large duck orchid looks more like a female sawfly than a duck to male sawflies, luring these pollinators. While many of these eye-catching plants are popular with gardeners, too great a market demand can place a strain on rarer species. For this reason, the government of Thailand has banned the export of the rare parrot flower plant and its seeds to protect its dwindling numbers in the wild.