He slaps a box of sexy chocolates onto your tum. Enchanted, you gobble them up only to discover a few hours later you’ve been impregnated. Meanwhile your gallant beau has gone hopping on his way. Such is love life among orthopteran bush cricket Poeclimon veluchianus.
Now, thanks to a pair of German researchers, we discover that it is the male that devised this dastardly deceit. But that’s love orthopteran style. Elsewhere it’s just not cricket.
Male fireflies attract mates by flashing them with bursts of light. But this is not enough revealed researchers from Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts. They too proffer a present: a spermatophore, a package containing sperm and nourishment for the female. The eager receivers, having tripped the light fantastic, go for the guys with the biggest, most nourishing gift, the scientists told an enthralled audience at the First Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology held in Ottawa last summer.
There’s no end to sexual innovation in the class Insecta. Like male snakes, penises come in pairs in earwigs of the family Anisolabidae. In particular, males of the earwig species Euborellia plebaga have two penises that are often larger than the earwig’s one-centimetre body. We are indebted to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for this information, which also tells us that cockroaches urinate on each other to assist insemination. Indeed they become so enthralled that their coupling may last for days.
By contrast, love making among bean weevils leaves a lot to be desired, at least from the female viewpoint. The amorous male’s penis is covered with a vicious set of barbs preventing his reluctant partner from giving him the heave-ho. So awesome is this armament that the poor female may die from her encounter, leading some concerned researchers to suggest the species are on the road to sexual obliteration.
If all this appears to take sex a trifle too much towards Fifty Shades of Grey, it was Mike Strobel writing in the Toronto Sun who urged us to, “Remember, the original St. Valentine was beaten with clubs and stoned by the Romans, and when that didn’t kill him, they chopped off his head.”
But this is nothing to years gone by – 400 million of them give or take a few million. Once again we are indebted to German scientists who, for reasons best be known to themselves delighted in examining the genitalia of fossilized Pholcidae, more familiarly known as craneflies or daddy longlegs. An ancient specimen from Scotland proved to have a penis two-thirds the length of the insect’s body. Rather unsurprisingly, as one commentator observed, the original insect is extinct.
Wes Porter is a horticultural consultant and writer based in Toronto. Wes has over 40 years of experience in both temperate and tropical horticulture from three continents.
