1. Our examination of sexual selection emphasized the seemingly bizarre conseque
ID: 258794 • Letter: 1
Question
1. Our examination of sexual selection emphasized the seemingly bizarre consequences of intra and inter specific competition. However, I don’t think I spoke to you about sex and death. Although teenage human males may tell their girlfriends that they will die if they don’t have sex, usually gamete transfer is not lethal to humans. In contrast, mating usually is fatal to males among spiders and praying mantis, and always is fatal to male honey bees. Based on investment in gametes, males being killed in mating seems counter intuitive (males only get to mate once). Offer a reasoned explanation for how this might have evolved, based on our discussions of sexual selection (and if you find this to be a difficult question, let me just tell you that spider biologists still can’t agree on how mating with male death evolved in many species).
Explanation / Answer
It is observed that the male honey bee die after they male and this has something largely to do with the sexual selection. The drone which is the male bee undergoes sexual suicide which means it sacrifices itself immediately after mating. As the drone get hold of the queen in mid-air, his endophallus is averted with help of abdominal muscle and inserts the same tightly into the reproductive tract of the queen. This is followed by immediate ejaculation which uses a lot of force and it leaves behind the tip of his endophallus behind inside the queen leading to the rupture of his abdomen. This leads to the death of the drone. The killing might have evolved based on sexual selection because the pressure and implication of the act is mostly faced by the drone. It is the rupture of the stomach due to the pressure and leaving behind of the tip of endophallus leading to the death.
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