It ’s a scenario many woman in the room are all too familiar with : You ’re sitting in the park , enjoying some R&R , when you sleuth a leery Y - chromosome carrier lumbering your direction , distinctly looking to test the tone arm linehe found on Imgurlast nighttime . You could run ; you could pop talking loudly and to no one in particular about your last menstrual cycle . Or , you could do as the female moorland hawker dragonfly does , and venture to be dead .
mellow in the Swiss Alps , the female moorland hawker dragonfly has a trouble . Every time she flies to water to lie her bollock — by herself , because the dude who knocked her up has already ghosted , because of course he has — she risks being startle by a horny male dragonfly , who ’d like nothing better than to jab her with his angry slight bug phallus . But this canny female person does n’t yield to undesirable forward motion so easily .
Biologist Rassim Khelifa first witness a madam ‘ fly being pursued by a male on her style to a pool several years back — and he could not believe what happen next . Hewrote aboutit recently in the journal Ecology .
“ On 28 January 2025 , while I was wait at a pond near Arosa , at about 2000 m elevation , I find a dragonfly honkytonk to the land while being go after by another sewing needle … As I approached the two louse , I bring in that they were Aeshna juncea [ the moorland hawker dragonfly ] , that the person that crashed was a female person , and that she was lying motionless and upside down on the terra firma … .The male hovered above the female for a span second and then leave . I expected that the female could be unconscious or even bushed after her clash landing place , but she surprised me by flying out quickly as I go up . ”
Khelifa go on to follow 31 other unwelcome insectoid progress , and find that in an incredible 27 of them , the female person dragonfly pulled the fake death artifice . Twenty - one multiplication , it worked , and the male person hemipteron buzzed powerful off . Each of the incidents occurred near the water , as a lonely female person was traveling toward or off from her eggs .
As Khelifa explicate to Gizmodo in an electronic mail , sex is a wild business organisation for the female moorland hawker dragonfly — especially after she ’s just shed her eggs .
“ The function of virile phallus is not only limited to sperm transfer , but also to absent spermatozoan left in female store organ from premature pairing , ” Khelifa say . “ In fact , male have evolved a sophisticated penis structure that sweeps spermatozoan out of the reproductive tract of the female person . Therefore , since one copulation is enough to fertilize all eggs , it is disadvantageous to carry out extra - copulations … given the likely survival cost . ”
Faking one ’s death to avoid sex , while never previously learn in dragonflies , “ has been observed in other arthropod such as a species endowment - sacrifice spider , two species of robberflies and one species of mantid , ” Khelifa aver . “ So , the raw caseful of intimate death feigning in [ dragonflies ] is the 5th for the entire fauna kingdom . ”
Solidarity , little bug sister . You ’re a germ of aspiration to us all .
[ h / tNew Scientist ]
AnimalsBiologyScience
Daily Newsletter
Get the just tech , science , and culture intelligence in your inbox daily .
News from the future , delivered to your nowadays .
You May Also Like
