Nature Adapts to the Most Awful Shit, Including "Traumatic Insemination"

Motherboard covered fairly recently the evolved mating strategy of male bed bugs, which involves said creeps literally stabbing female bed bugs with their horrible bed bug dick lances. As if you needed more evidence that bed bugs are just the worst things evolution ever spawned. Well, some new research into the mating habits of bugs — warehouse pirate bugs specifically, which do the same traumatic insemination thing — reveals that female bed bugs are up to their own evolutionary race to, you know, survive the attacks of the males.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t involve the female bed bugs acquiring a sheen of acid and melting the male’s unit as it goes for the stab. But it’s a pretty interesting illustration of how awesome and weird and stupid evolution is. The males evolved into this new method to have better chances at reproduction by taking more control, removing the female’s decision power. So the females have evolved in return to have new organs that help prevent infection, which helps them survive the attacks. And, since so many of them die young because of mating, the females have evolved to lay more eggs, upping their reproductive potential.

And that’s your nature-is-a-bad-dream news of the day. You can find all the details in the new issue of Biology Letters.

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Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.