Darkling beetles huddling in a cleft in some bark. It was much colder yesterday and they weren't coming out to play.
et avec John, excellent lecteur de road-book, on s'en est sortis sans erreur
Roesel's bush-crickets have evolved their amazing courtship apparatus.They have a pair of curved rods called titillators pointing out of their genital openings. They look a bit like coat hooks.Until recently no one knew what they were for. But it now seems they stimulate a sensitive area of the female's genitals.The new results have been published in the journal Arthropod Structure and Development.Gerlind Lehmann of the Humboldt-University Berlin in Germany and her colleagues examined the titillators under microscopes. Then they watched bush-crickets mating, and used CT scans to figure out what the titillators were doing during mating.They found that the male repeatedly, and rhythmically, inserted the titillators into the female's genital opening.The titillators were gently drumming on a plate inside the female's genitals. This plate was covered in different kinds of sensory cells, suggesting that the female could detect the titillators' drumming.This suggests that the titillators are somehow helping the male keep the female interested, much as mating humans perform foreplay on each other's genitals to stimulate sexual desire.In unpublished experiments, Lehmann tried shortening the titillators.The females became more likely to resist the male's attempts at mating, and males were less likely to succeed in transferring sperm.
A pair of Green Dock Beetles this morning. "During the mating season, females have enlarged abdomens." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastrophysa_viridula
