Are you finding your sex life lacking? Need to spice it up in the bedroom? Then look no further for inspiration than the bushcricket, whose sex life is so weird and so freaky that it puts most NC-17 fanfic to shame.
Bushcrickets, typically gentle insects, have developed what some scientists are calling an exceptionally violent mating routine. Here’s how things used to go down: the bushcrickets would mate, leaving the lady-cricket with a sperm-bag that takes some time to drain into her. To stop the lady-cricket from detaching the bag and peacing out, the dude-cricket would produce a special type of jelly for the lady-cricket to eat. This jelly is delicious and distracting, and ensures that the lady sticks around long enough for the sperm to actually get to work. Basically, the dude-cricket would make her dinner.
But now, apparently, dude-crickets aren’t doing the dinner thing any more. They’re over the romance. Instead, they’ve developed “clasping devices” near their genitals to hold down the female for up to seven hours during mating. The claspers can take the shape of spiked hooks that pierce through her body, bear traps, wrap-around tongs, or interlocking “handcuffs.” As you can imagine, the lady-crickets aren’t loving it, and spend most of the mating process jumping, biting, and kicking her parter.
But seriously, what was so wrong with the jelly dinner? Someone needs to teach these new dude-crickets about consent, stat.
(via ArsTechnica, photo by Mick Talbot and modified by me because I’m terrible)
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