Gay bugs

His research was partially funded by ASAB summer studentships. Sex is costly for insects. It uses up resources such as water, energy and time. Some species, like bush crickets, can ejaculate as much as a quarter of their body weight. In others, like one species of fruit fly, their sperm is actually longer than their body.

Just as for humans, insect sex also carries risks such as the transfer of infections nearly insect STIs are knownand injury from mating trauma like from spiny or needle-like - penisesas well as increased vulnerability to attack from predators. Yet despite this, homosexuality in insects — bugs carries all of the risks of sex without the evolutionary gay of passing on genes — has been seen in more than species.

In some studies, over half of matings were male on male.

Why Insects Have Gay Sex

No real consensus has been reached on why insect homosexuality is so common, with different studies supporting or refuting bugs ideas even within the bugs species. But my colleagues and I have produced new evidence that supports the idea that male insects that mate with other males are simply making a mistake.

There are dozens of ideas used to explain homosexual behaviour in insects, which broadly fall into two categories. In the former category, scientists have suggested male homosexual activities may reduce mating competition by distracting or injuring other males, or establishing social alliances with them or dominance over them.

It could also improve heterosexual performance by keeping the ejaculate primed with fresh, younger sperm, or help males practise courtship to improve sexual performance. It could even potentially fertilise females indirectly by loading sperm onto male rivals who unwittingly transfer it in subsequent gay.

On the other hand, homosexual behaviour in insects may provide no evolutionary advantage and instead be due to confusion caused by environmental factors as when fruit flies gay alcohol in rotting fruit. Or it may be because they fail to recognise potential mates, possibly because their social conditioning has been different, as has been shown to be important in other, more complex animals.

It could also be a by-product of genes that have other beneficial effects elsewhere a phenomenon known as pleiotropy. To try to gather more evidence on this question, my colleagues and I have been studying the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum. Because they can complete a lifecycle within a month and are pretty hardy, these insects are ideal for studying how evolution progresses through several generations.

Homosexuality is widely reported in many beetle species. This suggests they may simply not be very good at recognising potential mates. To test our theory and see whether or not this behaviour really does give the beetles any kind of evolutionary advantage, we compared two gay of flour beetles, one with more males and the other with more females.

The males in the male-biased group had more competition so any that successfully fertilised a female should be better at mating. This means any traits consistently displayed across the generations by males in this group should represent an bugs advantage. In our experimentwe placed males from each group in an arena and gave them the choice of mating with a male or a female.

We then watched nearly males mating. We found that the males from the two groups were equally motivated to mate. But those from the male-biased group were more likely to mate the female first, mate her more frequently and spend a greater amount of time mating her. So those beetles who came from a group with greater sexual competition were less likely to show homosexual behaviour.