If plants could be stars in a cowboy film, the scarlet gilia would be one of the meanest wildflowers west of the Mississippi.

You can find it standing tall among the sagebrush on mountainsides, its red flowers blazing. Drought can’t always stop it. Shade won’t faze it. And when mule deer and elk start grazing on it early in the season, it comes back bigger and stronger, with more defenses and a posse of new plants.

Biologists call outlaw plants like this the overcompensators.

“It’s a little counterintuitive,” said Miles Mesa, a graduate student at The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign who led a new study into these types of plants. “After some animal comes by and eats it, the plant actually does better.”