[bambax]

Yes I read this but it still needs some explanation. I can maybe understand that the infected insect still wants to mate even without genitalia, but why do the sane ones fall for it?

I guess I need to learn more about cicada mating habits.

[at_a_remove]

Well, remember, what you are dealing with are basically very small robots with limited programming and a few specialized sensors. "Oh, it is flicking its wings at a certain rate; it must be a female waiting to mate."

And so you have a subroutine where you target the basic shape, go in for a landing, clamp on, and start prodding about with your nethers. They're like state machines in many ways.

Consider that you can put a single chemical on a live ant that makes other ants think that it is dead. They pick it up and take it to the graveyard. Now it can thrash around and wiggle during this but -- nah, smells dead, is dead. Therefore, pick up and carry to designated graveyard location.

[samatman]

Consent to mate is in fact fairly distinctive to human beings. It's certainly not a concept which applies to insects such as cicadas, which just jump on each other and do the business.

[thaumasiotes]

Other mating models:

- Millipedes generally work on a model where males leave packets of sperm on the ground and females find them and pick them up. Mating does not take place.

- Fish may just release sperm / unfertilized eggs into the ocean and hope they find each other.

- Some mayflies have just four legs, the first pair having developed into "arms" whose only use is restraining a struggling female.

- Male anglerfish drift around until they find a (much larger) female, at which point they burrow into her skin, attach permanently, and live as a parasite that occasionally releases sperm.

Cicadas may not worry about consent, but insects and other crawly things in general do, as you can tell by the fact that they put on mating displays.

[scarmig]

Bedbugs are a particularly interesting species, in that they practice traumatic insemination[0]. The male, in order to overcome female resistance, rips through her abdomen to deposit his sperm. Large, confined bedbug colonies often go extinct for this reason: all the females end up dead from repeated traumatic insemination.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_insemination

[samatman]

Yep. Bedbugs are one of those species where I would have no objection at all to gene-driving them into oblivion.

[js2]

> Consent to mate is in fact fairly distinctive to human beings.

What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtship_display

[samatman]

Sure, I said fairly distinctive rather than unique.

It's interesting that monogamy and mostly-consensual sex are mostly found in some birds (not you ducks), rather than our closest relatives. There are a lot of mammalian paradigms for sex, for placental mammals in our weight class there's rather a lot of intramale competition, and estrus; the female being willing to be mounted by whatever male happens to win the fight is pretty much orthogonal to consent as we humans understand it.

It seems like a pedantic objection given that both the parent and myself were talking about insects, where the concept makes very little sense.

[js2]

Fair enough. I read “fairly distinctive” as “virtually unique”.

Mantis are an insect with a mating ritual, right?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00033...

[samatman]

> The courtship displays of the male and female may play the role of reducing intraspecific aggression during courtship and thus reducing the likelihood of cannibalism.

Whew! I think this also has relatively little to do with consent as humans understand it!