Photo by Claire Woods licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Pollination is one of the major advantages flowering plants have over the rest of the botanical tree. With a few exceptions, flowers have cornered this market. It no doubt has played a significant role in their rise to dominance on the landscape. The importance of flowers is highlighted by the fact that they are costly structures. Because they don't photosynthesize, all plants take a hit on energy reserves when it comes time to flower. Sepals, petals, pollen, nectar, all of these take a lot of energy to produce which is why some plants cheat the system a bit.
Sexual mimicry is one form of ruse that has evolved repeatedly. The flowers of such tricksters mimic receptive female insects waiting for a mate. The evolution of such a strategy taps into something far deeper in the mind of animals than food. It taps into the need to reproduce and that is one need animals don't readily forego. As such, sexually deceptive flowers usually do away with the production of costly substances such as nectar. They simply don't need it to attract their pollinators.
Photo by Dr. Alexey Yakovlev licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
By and large, the world of sexual mimicry in plants is one played out mainly by orchids. However, there exists an interesting exception to this rule. A daisy that goes by the scientific name Gorteria diffusa has evolved a sexually deceptive floral strategy of its own. Native to South Africa, this daisy is at home in its Mediterranean climate. It produces stunning orange flowers that very much look like those of a daisy. On certain petals of the ray florets, one will notice peculiar black spots. From region to region there seems to be a lot of variation in the expression of these spots but all are textured thanks to a complex of different cell types.
The spots may seem like random patterns until the flowers are visited by their pollinator - a tiny bee-fly known scientifically as Megapalpus nitidus. With flies present, one can sort of see a resemblance. This would not be a mistake on the observers part. Indeed, when researchers removed or altered these spots, bee-fly visitation significantly decreased. Although this didn't seem to influence seed production, it nonetheless suggests that those spots are there for the flies.
When researchers painted spots on to non-textured petals, the bee-flies ignored those as well. It appears that the texture of the spots makes a big difference to visiting flies. What's more, although female flies visited the flowers, a majority of the visits were by males. It appears that the presence of these spots is keying in on the mate-seeking and aggregation behavior of their bee-fly pollinators. Further investigation has revealed that the spots even reflect the same kind of UV light as the flies themselves, making the ruse all the more accurate. This case of sexual mimicry is unique among this family. No other member of the family Asteraceae exhibits such reproductive traits (that we know of). Although it doesn't seem like seed production is pollinator limited, it certainly increases the chance of cross pollination with unrelated individuals.