No need to buy this beetle a drink first.
While many human men may struggle with the concept, male darkling beetles know the importance of foreplay — specifically, oral sex with his lady bug.
Researchers have observed the “precopulatory” ritual of the desert beetle Platyope mongolica, aka the Mongolian darkling beetle, in which the male’s mouth — or maxillary palpi — titillates the female beetle’s genital area.
Meanwhile, the alluring female will entice her suitor by thrusting her hips — or abdominal terminus — upward in a teasing display of sexual interest, according to scientists at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
But there’s no real romance in what researchers called the “remarkable” courtship of darkling beetles. Their hurried mating is simply a four-step process: the male pursues the female, follows up with oral contact, then mounts and, finally, has intercourse with her, according to a new study published in Ecology and Evolution.
As such, it’s no surprise that the female also wastes no time if her suitor’s skills are lacking. If she’s not satisfied with his oral technique, she will simply ghost her lover in the middle of the act — leaving her hot and bothered date to find gratification elsewhere.
Indeed, oral sex proved a very important part of the darkling beetle mating process. In one experiment, scientists removed the males’ maxillary palpi to find out whether it would interrupt the ritual. “Results showed that copulation duration significantly decreased after removal of males’ maxillary palpi,” they said.
And, mirroring human sex life, researchers also pointed out that the less time a male spent on performing oral sex, the longer he took during copulation — and the more likely it was that the whole shebang would be unsuccessful.
So take it from the beetle and don’t skip foreplay, scientists suggest as they wrote: “We confirm that precopulatory oral sexual contact is a form of investment for successful copulation.”