Sperm piracy, virgin births, incest and stabbings. No, not a synopsis of the new Game Of Thrones episode, but a taster into the lives of kinky insects.
‘Give and take’ is a sound, all encompassing philosophy. Dragonflies have adopted this system and really run with it. During sex they not only donate their own sperm, but utilise their jagged penis to scrape out any rival sperm they detect inside the female. That’s right, dragonflies are sperm pirates.
This is not because they have an obsessive compulsive disorder regarding hygiene. Female dragonflies are glorious, open-minded creatures who don’t mind giving it away to multiple partners.
The males developed this ‘smash & grab’ strategy in order to help improve the probability of their sperm winning the egg race and continuing their lineage. Dragonflies will not tolerate sloppy seconds.
That’s not the beginning of the rough stuff though as the copulation is not always consensual. The male clutches the female so viciously in a vice-like grip that it leaves permanent holes in her head. Sometimes the base of her wings may get bitten as well to prevent a swift escape.
So the next time you see a cute dragonfly couple flying in tandem remember that the female is most likely a sexual prisoner that has had grappling hook like spiny claspers forced into her head and is having her vagina involuntary scraped out by a rapey penis.
Not wishing to be upstaged by Jesus’ miracle birth, aphids are able to produce offspring with their virginity unmolested. The joyful torment of childbirth wihout any of that icky and time consuming sex getting in the way, sound appealing? The lack of horny aphids roaming through the night hunting for mates may explain why 10 out of 10 aphid night clubs fail.
Aphids give birth asexually meaning that the egg remains unfertilised. This process of parthenogenesis results in every baby being an identical clone to the mother. That’s right, insects possess cloning technology. A feat that took us, the allegedly most intelligent life form in the known universe, over 200,000 years to achieve has been routine for aphids for over 280 million years.
Something equally disturbing is that every baby that comes into the world is already pregnant. Think of it like Russian dolls, the embryos already contain the third generation embryo inside of them. People outraged by rampant teenage pregnancy rates amongst humans would have heart attacks if they were insects; one aphid can produce as many 600,000,000,000 - six hundred billion- of these virgin clones in one season.
Some hope exists though for the single parent virgins with billions of snot-nosed kids running around. When Autumn arrives bringing temperature drops, females will begin birthing sexual male and winged females that can create children with egg laying capabilities.This means that some lucky aphids can experience sex and won’t get red-faced when Madonna’s ‘Like a virgin’ plays in their non-existent night clubs.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2006/04/dragonfly-mating/ackerman-text
