I said the sex lives of bed bugs were interesting but none of our business here, didn’t I?
But a free research article is never to be ignored!
And if it also happens to be fantastically interesting…:
Sensory traps and sensory exploitation largely apply to an early phase of the reproductive interaction, that is, the attraction of females by males. However, females may also incur increased mating rates without being attracted. If females are subjected to costly additional matings because they are pursuing other, obligate activities they are caught in a “situation” trap. The equivalent male perspective would be called situation exploitation.
The obligate activity in question is binge blood feeding:
A system that we believe will exhibit such situation exploitation by males is blood sucking in insects. During the multiple evolutionary origins of blood sucking there was associated selection for reducing the amount of travel to, or exposure on, the host by taking few but large blood meals. However, the resulting increase in body mass and volume (up to several hundred percent of the unfed values: Lehane 2005) of this binge feeding comes at a cost: an impaired ability to move and escape from the host (Lehane 2005).
Reinhardt, K., Naylor, R., & Siva-Jothy M.T. (2009) Situation exploitation: higher male mating success when female resistance is reduced by feeding. Evolution 63:1, 29-39
These pages may be of related interest:
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