A Springbok male who prays to look for a hook doesn’t have to worry about a woman stealing her heart away.
However, there is a very good change that she will put her head off, and he is familiar with it.
In fact, 60 percent of sexual encounters between Springboks – one of nearly 2,000 mantis species worldwide – end up in males eating them as a snack.
“The males play Russian roulette every time they meet cannibalistic females,” explained Nathan Burke, an entomologist at the University of Auckland and an expert on mantis math rituals.
All male costumes show great care when they go to a prospective partner. It’s hard to blame them.
But while most will shine from the back or take off the woman with a delicious morsel, the Springbok has a completely different – and previously unheard – strategy for survival, which according to conclusions published Wednesday in Biology Letters.
“With the threat of a cannibalistic attack, the males try to subdue women by pushing them down in a violent struggle,” said Burke, co-author with colleague Gregory Holwell of the study.
Female mantis injured by scratching with male. (© Dr Nathan W Burke)
Men who win the puzzle of the lovers are far more likely to wear the friendship, “which shows that wrestling is both a courtship tactic and a survival device,” he said.
The key to victory, according to gladiatorial experiments with 52 pairs of mantises, was to strike first.
If the male were more quickly attracted to and captured the female by his serrated raptorial forests, he stood a 78 percent chance of escaping without loss.
And when, moreover, the male inflicted a major but non-fatal injury to the abdomen, he held his head each time.
“I was very surprised to find that males hurt women while trying to give them up for breeding,” said Burke. “Nothing like that has ever been observed. never in mantises before. “
If the female was bitten first, however, the males would always be killed and mutilated.
Homogeneous reproduction
Overall, the males came out more than half the time in those jousts, which lasted an average of 13 seconds.
Winning the game did not lead to automatic mating – the connection lasted only two-thirds of the time, and even then the male went up in the female’s stomach half the time.
The bright green mantis of Springbok, aka Miomantis caffra, native to southern Africa, but has spread to New Zealand, southern Europe and California, possibly through the pet trade.
The nutrients obtained when a female mantis eats her courtship will benefit her offspring as they grow.
Sexual cannibalism – when a female eats the male during or after breeding – is also well known among spiders, such as the black widow, and scorpions.
The smaller males usually do what they can to avoid lifting a beak, including dead play.
But other Springbok female tricks have picked up another trick of their spiky narrowness: their ability to reproduce abnormally, or without any help from males.
“They can make clones themselves if they don’t breed,” Burke said.
Falling back on this Plan B raises an interesting question: if women are so good at cannibalizing males that they can reproduce without sex, how are the males still there?
“That’s what inspired me to take such a close look at male mating tactics,” Burke said.
Sexual conflict theory, he explained, tells us that men in this situation should develop countermeasures to help them reproduce and remain relevant.
And sure enough, that is what the researchers found.
“It’s a wonderful example of how sexual conflict can produce evolutionary tactics that help one sex but hinder the other.”
© Agence France-Presse