Fruit Fly Sex

Fruitfly Foreplay?While women in the human species tend to prefer our sex long enough to keep the juices the flowing until we can hopefully reach the big "o", female fruit flies like their intercourse limited to about 90 seconds or less. Conversely, the males of the species prefer their sex longer.

The reasons are biologically-based, but the disturbing thing to me was how the study was performed to reach these results. Usually, during insectal-coitus (which is my made-up term), the female fruit fly will start to struggle by kicking and fighting somewhere around the minute and a half mark. To the alert male, this means, "Please stop before I kick your ass" which apparently works.

It is believed that the males of the species would prefer to continue this longer.

Prepare yourself, because this is the gross part coming up. The researchers, in order to determine how the males of the species felt about the shortened sex lives, had the great idea of letting the guys have sex with dead females. It might not sound like much fun to those in our particular species, but apparently it was a hit with the male fruit flies:

"The dead insects were propped up to convince the males that they were still alive, and ready for sex, said the researchers.

The team observed that male flies’ sex with the dead insects lasted 1.5 times longer than it did with live females."

Yuck! I don't even like to think about the individual who might have considered this as a possible study, or who would even fund it. The study was performed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology and supposedly has implications for how long females in our species want sex.

One English researcher came up with some total BS about how females don't want longer sex per se, only longer foreplay. The researcher, named Rhonda Snook, failed to mention whether foreplay even comes into play for the fruit flies or not, which I hesitate to even consider visually. Perhaps some kind of fruit-fly like dance around a ceremonial rotting banana?

The female fire flies' preference for quickies and possible nooners arises from their biological need to find a reproductive partner. The females tend to mate with multiple partners due to an unfortunately high rate of infertility among the male fruit flies. The slower the pace signifies less competition for the males, but it is not so lucky for the female flies.