Not feeling amorous? ... Try faking death!
If saying, “Sorry honey I have a headache tonight,” doesn’t block his amorous advances how about ‘going Possum’? … Seriously? … Fake death? Well, there are so many other things we learn from nature why not this too? Apparently ‘sexual death feigning’, one of the rarest behaviours in nature due to its scarcity, is exactly what the fairer sex in one of the dragonfly species does.
In fact according to an article written by Hannah Osborne based on the scientific research of Rassim Khelifa and published in Newsweek (28 April 2017), which is where I discovered it, female Aeshna juncea (Moorland Hawker Dragonfly) together with two species of robber fly, the European mantis and the male of the spider species Pisaura mirabilis all partake in faking their own deaths - the latter, it’s worth noting, in order to avoid being killed after mating!
It’s just so damn interesting I had to share it. So here’s my non-scientific summary on the subject:
Recent research shows that when undergoing airborne harassment, which by the way is perfectly normal courtship behaviour in any dragonfly relationship, and the obvious signal of continuous avoidance manoeuvres clearly isn’t driving home, the female Moorland Hawker dragonfly simply and abruptly stops flying, falls out of the sky and lies prostrate on the ground feigning death. Apparently, also according to careful observational research of my own in the form of reading through Osborne’s notes on Khelifa’s study, dragonflies aren’t into practising necrophilia, and so after gathering himself from the shock departure of his single-minded quest, exclaiming “What the f *@!”, the pursuing male Moorland Hawker dragonfly soon loses interest and flies off in search of another female of the species to similarly harass.
Of course there is a more scientific explanation offered by Khelifa, a zoologist from the University of Zurich, based on his observations of females arriving at the ponds where the males were waiting to mate, a male intercepting her mid-air before copulating somewhere nearby and then flying away leaving the female to lay eggs on her own, without any protection—unlike many other dragonfly species where the male will guard the female.
And I quote from the article … “Females became vulnerable to male coercion at that time because conspecific males were constantly patrolling each corner of the pond looking for a mate,” he writes. Further observations showed that the more male competition there was, the more likely female dragonflies were to fake their own deaths.
Khelifa suggested this behaviour is common among the female of this dragonfly species, and that it could have evolved for a number of reasons: “On one hand, this behaviour could have resulted from exaptation. Since death feigning already exists in the behavioural repertoire of dragonflies, females of the Moorland Hawker expanded the use of this anti-predatory function to avoid male coercion,” he wrote. “On the other hand, the origin of this exaptation is probably sexual conflict where each sex adopts reproductive strategies that best serve its own survival and reproductive success.”
Even though it is a risky strategy, faking death appears to help females survive longer and produce more offspring by avoiding coercion.}
Mind you, that last line has me doubting this would mostly work out well in the human species. Maybe not such a clever idea after all … but fascinating nonetheless.
