[This is my third post of Sex Week]
Here’s a song for the male water strider, from the days when Rod Stewart could do no wrong:
In my first two posts for Sex Week, I wrote about the delights of courtship: the alluring, informative fragrance of yeast and the seductive buzz of electric fish. These signals stir the opposite sex into action–to creep towards a fellow fungus, or to head-butt a prospective mate. But in many species, the actual consummation that all that courtship leads up to does not turn out to be a blissful union. Instead, some males will use all kinds of force and subterfuge to prolong their mating and raise the odds that their sperm fertilize their mate’s eggs. And the females? In some species, they very often just want to get away.