Boquila trifoliolata grows in the jungles of Chile and Argentina. What sets these plants apart from the rest is the ability of their leaves to change shape based on their surroundings. We know that some plants climb on trees and wrap around their branches in order to get sunlight and support their expansion on the branches. This is normal, but Boquila trifoliolata camouflaged its leaves to match the shape of the leaves of the surrounding plants.
Normally, camouflage in living things requires touch so that the organism can analyze and copy the entity that it wants to camouflage to, but these plants are able to monitor and copy the shape that they want to camouflage to without physical contact with it, which opens the possibility that these plants can see (i.e. electromagnetic monitoring of the reflection of photons around them).
More research is currently being conducted to verify the hypothesis of the ability of these plants to see, but until today we do not know how these plants can know the shapes around them.
The evolutionary benefit of camouflage is to protect the leaves of this plant from leaf-eating insects, which is not a new mechanism in nature and we call it Batesian mimicry, where weak organisms defend themselves by imitating organisms that are considered poisonous and harmful to their direct predators.
But the ability of these plants to see is a new phenomenon that is not yet well understood.
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