Valentine Alert: Male Insects Seduce With Fake Finery

Male and female dance flies meet in a common area during breeding season to mate, a phenomenon known as lekking. Pairs form in the lek and then descend to mate on the surrounding vegetation. The researchers followed the pairs to where they landed.

Thus assured that the pairs had just begun copulation, the scientists substituted four gifts on a rotating basis: large nutritious gifts (in this case, almost-whole prey insects), large worthless tokens (balls of cotton wool), small nutritious gifts (fragments of prey insects), and small useless tokens (tiny bits of cotton wool).

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Though the switching of gifts was tricky—with a 20 percent success rate—the scientists noted that the females had to have hold of real gifts or substitutes. Otherwise, they immediately stopped mating.

Timing of the copulation began as soon as the female accepted the substitute gift.

The Ultimate Sacrifice

Of course there are some species where the females won't be fooled by tawdry offerings. Among some cannibalistic species in which the female is larger and more predatory than the male, the females require the ultimate sacrifice.

"There's some evidence the female has to eat the head of the male mantid to release the full complement of mating behaviors," Heydon said. "In other words, they can't do it unless he loses his head."

When the male loses his head—literally—it blocks normal inhibitory nerve impulses, and he becomes more enthusiastic sexually, at least from a physical point of view. Bizarre as it seems, the male mantid can continue to engage in sex after his head has been devoured.

Sexual cannibalism isn't an absolute requirement for the mantis to reproduce. If the male can successfully sneak up on the female, jump on her back, and afterward retreat successfully, he lives to see another day. It's during approach and departure that he is vulnerable.

The advantage of mate eating for the female may be that it provides a conveniently handy source of protein for herself and her offspring.

Females in more than 80 other species have been known to eat their mates before, during, or after mating.

In her book on the evolutionary biology of sex, titled Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation, Olivia Judson writes about the mating habits of midges.

"The female captures her mate as she would any old prey and plunges her proboscis into his head while they link genitalia. Her spittle turns his innards to soup, which she slurps up, drinking until she's sucked him dry, then dropping his shell. only his manhood, which breaks off inside her, betrays the fact that this was no ordinary meal."

Keep that in mind, fellas, when you're out shopping for your sweetheart today.

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