It’s all about the heart. Damselflies can copulate for more than 30 minutes in this distinctive shape, and they maintain their libido even as they get older.
David Thompson from the University of Liverpool and his team captured this image at the Queen Elizabeth Country Park in Hampshire, UK. They have found that getting older doesn’t affect the mating success of males or females. What’s more, the insects – which appear to have sex during most of their short, few-weeks-long lives – can mate at the same rate as their younger counterparts until they die.
Observations at a pond in the park show that females find a mate almost 100 per cent of the time. After copulation, they lay their eggs and then venture off to generate new ones before returning to the action. Older females return just as often as younger damselflies.
Older males don’t fare badly either. Competition for females is fierce: males fight for a mate, often harming females that get in their way. Although weaker males often lose out, their age isn’t a factor.
However continuous mating is likely to take its toll. The team speculates that only the strongest damselflies survive and keep on reproducing.
The findings could apply to other insects as well, giving new insight into species such as malaria-carrying mosquitoes and tsetse flies, carriers of the parasite that causes sleeping disease. A better understanding of their reproduction could help control these populations.
Although damselflies may not carry disease, they sometimes give parasites a free ride. A new species of parasitoid wasp was recently caught hitch-hiking on a damselfly’s back
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