The female mantis is hungry and even eats the rats, and you don't blame the female mantis for eating her husband, it is really the courtship behavior of the male mantis is too "rogue". On average, 100 male mantises courted, only 16 can leave alive, and the courtship journey of male mantises can be described as "nine deaths in a lifetime".
Are male praying mantises really voluntary?
The story of the male mantis voluntarily sacrificing for the sake of its offspring is indeed moving, but the reality is that this is only the product of human imagination.
In fact, male praying mantises are not willing.
In the field observation, it was found that every time they mated, the male mantis was careful, and as soon as the breeding task was over, it would immediately escape, and there was no intention of appearing.
However, because of the difference in body size, male mantises are generally difficult to escape, or they will be reluctantly eaten.
Among the many sexually-eating animals, there are also many who are willing to give their lives, and the red-backed spider is one of them.
The reason for the red-backed spider to eat the mantis is similar to that of the praying mantis, but the male spider is willing to be eaten, and the only reason is to increase the chance of conception.
Male spiders have two mating devices, and when one is mating, in order to prolong the time, it will actively send its abdomen to the female spider. When the female spider is enjoying a meal, the male spider will take the opportunity to pull out the first one, replace it with another one, and continue mating.
In this way, although the male spider is cruelly eaten, it has twice as much mating time as the average male spider and can produce more offspring.
According to statistics, male spiders who voluntarily sacrifice their lives will have 40% more offspring than male spiders that have not been eaten. #真知新坐标 #
Praying mantis, an invertebrate, because its large knife hands are always hanging, and the half-upright appearance is shaped like a prayer, so the praying mantis is called "prayer worm" in the hope of the West, and in ancient Greece, people regarded it as a "prophet".
Its body consists of three parts, namely the head, chest, and lower limbs.
Among them, the most eye-catching place of the praying mantis is that in addition to the two pairs of large knives on its body, the most eye-catching thing is the pair of compound eyes on its body.
At both ends of the upper side of its mop cloth there is a pair of large and round compound eyes, of which there are 3 simple eyes in the middle of the compound eye, and its compound eye vision is very good.
Because its compound eye is composed of 10,000 small eyes, the functions of different parts of the compound eye are also different, some are responsible for stalking, and some are responsible for normal staring.
In addition, the neck of the praying mantis is the most awesome neck in nature, because it can twist 180 degrees, which means that its head can still be twisted behind it.
In fact, not all female mantises and female spiders will eat male mantises and spiders. Some scientists have shown that when male mantises seek mates, if the female mantis actively accepts mating, in this case, the female mantis generally does not eat the male mantis, unless at the time of mating, the female mantis does not eat, is too hungry, and mistakenly takes the male mantis as food; Or when they were disturbed during mating, they instinctively killed the male mantis.
Scientist experiments
Scientists are curious about this mechanism during the mating process of praying mantises, so they have done a lot of experiments. For example, a biologist provided the female mantises with plenty of food before allowing the mantises to reproduce, so that they could eat and drink enough. Next, the lights were dimmed and the camera was used to observe that during the multi-breeding process, there was basically no phenomenon of eating.
Another American scientist found that the feeding in the mating accounted for about 60% of the mother mantis's diet during the breeding season, and speculated that this time the feeding was crucial for the mother mantis. Scientists implanted an amino acid into crickets and fed them to male praying mantises. Male and female mantises are then allowed to mate, and about half of the male mantises are eaten. The researchers then began to detect the female praying mantis, and the data showed that the female mantis that ate the husband had about 90% of this amino acid component in the body, while the female mantis that did not eat the husband had only 25% of the amino acids in the body. And a large part of this amino acid is delivered to the eggs in the mother praying mantis. In other words, a large part of the male praying mantises that are eaten are converted into nutrients and delivered to the babies.
After repeated experiments, scientists have given a reasonable explanation, that is, the female mantis eats male mantises not for the next generation, and the premise of this situation is whether the female mantis is in a state of hunger. That is to say, whether the female mantis is hungry or not directly determines the fate of the male mantis, and if it is hungry at the beginning, then the male mantis does not even have the opportunity to mate. If the female mantis is semi-starved, the male mantis will be eaten during mating or after mating. If the female mantis is full, it will not eat the male mantis at any time.
summary
Not all praying mantises will eat the opposite sex, most praying mantises will not eat their own kind even when hungry, while a very few mantises with a sexual eating habit will only eat their "husbands" when hungry. Therefore, whether the female mantis eats the male mantis depends on the species and the degree of hunger,
