Ok, Ok for you purists and those born before 1980, the J. Geils Band rock opus was “Love Stinks”, but I am allowed a little creative license. For bedbugs love is a pretty rough business. Mating occurs by traumatic insemination. As scary as that sounds, this video describing the process by Isabella Rosallini for the IFC program Green Porno is much, much worse. Please bring me the bleach and steel wool, I feel unclean. The male bedbug has a penis shaped like a hypodermic needle, which it uses to pierce the exoskeleton of the female and inject sperm into her body. The sperm then travels through her body and into the ovaries. The adaptive value of this form of mating is contested in the literature. The mating leaves the female damaged, possibly reducing her ability to lay the eggs the male just inseminated. Meaning he might be reducing the number of offspring he produces, a big no, no in evolution. So why the rough stuff, well some scientists have hypothesized that it is a consequence of competition between males. If you are a male bedbug, your only goal in life is to inseminate as many of the 500+ eggs a female will lay as possible. This would be easy if females were faithful, monogamous partners, but instead they may be brazen hussies who will mate with multiple partners. In this case males who can get their sperm closest to the female’s eggs have a better chance of fertilizing more of her eggs. In bedbugs, some males may have evolved longer penises, allowing them to inject sperm closer to the female’s eggs within oviduct, while others skipped the whole overly complex female vaginal tract, whose twists and turns and sperm storage sacks can slow down sperms journey to the eggs, and injected their sperm right into the abdomen.
