Bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) are the absolute worst. If the bites, social stigma, meteoric population increase over the last 10 years, and stirrings of a warm-weather-induced, particularly infested 2012 weren’t enough, there’s also a biological reason to dislike them: Bed bugs are violent sexual predators.
Male bed bugs take part in a rare and brutal form of insect mating called “traumatic insemination.” They mate by stabbing their saber-like penis through the abdomen of females and inseminating directly into her body cavity. There isn’t some easily explained evolutionary reason for this horror on the female bed bug’s end – actually, it’s the opposite. Females often suffer from this form of mating, and can die from wounds and potential infections. Traumatic insemination in bed bugs is, according to Cornell biologists Alastair Stutt and Michael Sive-Jothy, “a coercive male copulatory strategy that results in a sexual conflict of interests.”
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Really? That’s how they describe it? This is as about as much of a “conflict of interest” as the ‘lust’ scene in Se7en.
Many studies over the last few decades have shown that sex in the animal kingdom is not always a mutually beneficial act. Males and females don’t necessarily share the same reproductive goals. Studies on sperm competition are a good example of sexual conflicts of interest: While females want to be fertilized by the sperm of the best (i.e. most genetically fit) males, males, of course, just want their sperm to win the race. Many species develop ways to cheat the traditional courtship system, sometimes even physically removing competing males’ sperm (seen, for instance, in the cloaca-pecking behaviors of male Dunnocks.
Bed bugs have taken this idea to the extreme, just as they have taken their unmatched survival abilities to the extreme. It is theorized that traumatic insemination increases the likelihood that a mating bug can successfully fertilize a female that another male already tried to mate with.
The ultimate benefits of this form of reproduction aren’t exactly clear – some scientists actually point to bed bug sex as an exploitable weakness for developing better means of extermination. One such idea involves hijacking the evolved hormone alert system male bed bugs have in order to avoid accidental sexual attacks by their male peers (which happens to be a somewhat common event). The idea is that if we could shut this system off, male bed bugs may travel around their group traumatically inseminating indiscriminately, spearing and wounding scores of their evil male comrades.
Whatever scientists come up with, male bed bugs’ appalling sexual tendencies are just further confirmation that they are the worst literally blood-sucking insects on earth (next to mosquitoes I guess, who kill more humans than anything) and I hope scientists soon find the most painfully fierce methods of murdering them in vast numbers.
