Eat me baby: wooing the sagebrush cricket way

Sally Adee, features editor

Imagine if every time you wanted to have sex you had to get bitten by a shark. That's?life as?a shark. But the graphic pictures of the fin-ripping aftermath of a shark ?romp? were far from the worst thing I saw on Tuesday night at the Valentine?s-themed night safari at?London's Natural History Museum. There were two tracks; you could choose between the Turn Me On and Turn Me Off tour. Having already been thoroughly turned off by a month of exploitative Valentine?s day adverts, I chose the latter.

It?s downright fashionable to be irritated by the eagerness of commerce to capitalise on our most fundamental drives. But a close look at the animal kingdom reveals that perhaps we got off easy. Compared to that, maybe offensive advertisements insinuating that women trade sex for diamonds, or that a man?s worth can be judged by the quality of his offerings, aren?t so bad after all.

For example, on Valentine?s day a wealth of advertisements for romantic meals make us acutely aware of the importance of feeding the lady before you get the good stuff. This seems to be the reason that restaurants feel comfortable gouging their patrons with prix fixe nightmares.

Erica McAlister, an entomologist at the Natural History Museum, knows that the link between sex and food is nowhere so direct as in the mating life of the sagebrush cricket: the meal with which this amorous little guy woos his sweet love is himself. To keep his lady friend engaged during sex, he turns his wings into her willing and delicious meal. ?They?re quite meaty,? McAlister told the group.

But if the lady cricket dispenses with her lover?s wings too quickly, which she usually does, she keeps on snacking on the rest of him. ?Once she?s got into the body, she sucks on his weeping wounds, so she?s getting a nice drink too,? McAlister told us approvingly as we struggled to hold down our own meals.

A family of flies known as Empididae or dance flies, which McAlister affectionately calls ?chocolate box? flies for reasons that will soon become clear, takes a decidedly more modern approach. Eschewing self-sacrifice, gentlemen chocolate box flies evolved to catch smaller flies to woo their lady friends during sex. Like the sagebrush cricket, Lady Chocolate Box has a colossal appetite, which posed a problem for Mr Chocolate Box: though he survives the event, there?s a good chance he?ll be jilted when she finishes before he can, becomes immediately bored and moves on to the next chump brandishing a snack.

Tiring of this charade, Mr Chocolate Box contrived an ingenious adaptation: using his mucus, he crafted an elaborate silk-like box for the meal, which his lady would have to work to open, giving him plenty of time to do the deed.

Indeed, some males figured out how to make the boxes so sturdy that the lady could only get halfway finished with her meal before they had been sated. These cheeky cads then took the box back (including its half eaten contents), rewrapped it and re-gifted it for their next date.

But wait, it gets better: having seen how wildly successful the whole charade was, an especially enterprising Mr Chocolate Box realised there was no longer a need for a gift at all - make the box strong enough and the greedy lass would spend all her copulating time trying to pry open her gift. Only after he?s long gone does she realise that she?s been stuck with an empty box.

If a romantic meal is persuasion, then the mind-altering effects of the obligatory champagne is surely coercion. Once again nature scoffs at our best. The humble dust mite renders its ladies helpless with a rohypnol-like pheromone, does his business and then skitters away, leaving her to wake up in a regret-filled daze.

Once you?ve snared your lady, what?s left but to drop dead? One ad made this point this Valentine?s day, suggesting the ?real? way to show your wife you care about her is to give her the gift of your own advance funeral arrangements.You know who could help you out with that? The garden spider. Once it?s mated it leaves its dead self behind in the female?s cavity in the form of a genital plug to ensure that the female can?t reproduce with anyone else.

There is no question that the museum made good on its promise to turn me off. In fact, it turned me off so much that I could barely look at the post-Valentine?s day chocolate shrapnel the next day. A grand success!

The Natural History Museum?s Turn Me Off? tour may have proven there?s no romance in nature, but there are plenty of examples of less offputting sexual practices.

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Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/1cb42669/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cculturelab0C20A120C0A20Ceat0Eme0Ebaby0Ewooing0Ethe0Esagebrush0Ecricket0Eway0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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