Female Supremacy Articles - Page 26

Screen 2 of 31

Given the cost of males, it is perhaps not surprising that there are at least 40 species where the female kills the male during or after sex. In the case of the praying mantis, she literally bites his head off as part of foreplay, and he carries on in a delighted reflex of posthumous orgasm高潮 — the sexual climax. Females of other species are equally imaginative: male scale insects have been demoted to microscopic excrescences on their females’ legs, while female angler fish carry their mates on their backs as tiny dwarves. More pertinently, there are many effective ways of reproducing apart from sex as we understand it. These include simple division and gene exchange, which have served prokaryotes so well that they have produced the longest-enduring of all species on the planet, as well as comprising the greatest number of species, and probably constituting most of the biomass as well.