Traumatic Insemination

For the first entry to this blog, it is only appropriate to begin with traumatic insemination. This was one of the first epicly cool things I learned about insects, and since then I was hooked!




The insect pictured is known as Cimex lectularius, a species of bed bug. For the insect savvy, it belongs to the order Hemiptera, family Cimicidae. This nasty little bug is hematophagous (blood feeding) and lives along ridges in your mattress. They are nocturnal, emerging from their hiding spot a little before dawn to feast upon your blood while you're dreaming. The bite results in spotting, with many people developing severe rashes.




Bed bugs are a hemimetabolous insect, undergoing an incomplete metamorphosis. One female can lay as many as 200-500 eggs in its life. After the egg is laid, in 1-2 weeks the egg will hatch and a first instar nymph emerges. There are five nymphal stages, each stage requiring a blood meal to move on to the next. It takes roughly 5 weeks for a nymph to reach the adult stage, where it becomes sexually active.

It is extremely pestiferous, especially to motel goers. Horribly enough, it is near impossible to get rid of these buggers. The nymphal stages can last several months without a blood meal, while the adults may live a full year without a meal! The only way to get rid of these guys is to call a professional to vacuum them to hell. But this is not what makes this insect so fascinating.


(This picture depicts a bed bug before and after a blood meal)



The crazy thing about this bug is that the females have no sexual genital openings! You may ask, well how does the species propagate? Is it asexual? The answer is quite horrific. The males have a hypodermic penis that is stabbed into the female's body cavity and the sperm is released into the blood to find its way to the proper female organs. To make matters worse, the tip of the penis has chemoreceptors in which he can "taste" inside the female. Creeper! By this means the male can ascertain whether the female has had a recent blood meal. If she has been freshly fed and can produce a good amount of eggs, he gives her more sperm, otherwise he gives her very little and moves on to another female.


(This just looks excruciatingly painful!)

As one can imagine, this is an extremely traumatic experience for the female. This gives her an open puncture wound of which she is disabled until the wound heals and makes the female susceptible to infection. In fact, female bed bugs have a 25% greater mortality rate than do males of the same species. Luckily enough the female has developed an organ called a spermalege that aids in fertilization and keeps infection low. This spermalege is a false vagina, and is located in the area that a male will usually penetrate the female, making for safer bug sex.

But, obviously a female bed bug would want to avoid mating at all costs, so another evolutionary strategy the females have developed is pseudo male parts! The females that look the most like a male are least likely to be date raped. Because of this the males are a very confused lot. Many males will mistakenly mate with other males simply because they guessed wrong. But they don't care, the promiscuous little buggers mate with anything bed bug sized.

A spermalege and a false penis...Ladies 2 : Males 0

However, traumatic insemination is only the tip of the iceberg in the Wonderful World of Ent! :D