Many are as of now mindful that dragonflies can do some incredible things for the survival of its species, as long-distance flying and expect a prey's actions for a quick kill. The bright or colorful fliers also display some surprising behavior yet it is not up to this point a zoologist has possessed the capacity to observe the particular behavior shown by females of the Aeshna juncea species.
A study published on April 24 says that female normal hawkers, also called moorland hawkers or sedge darners dragonflies, tend to fake a crash-and-die situation to keep males from attacking them to mate. Rassim Khelifa, a zoologist from the University of Zurich, had been out in the Swiss Alps to conduct an investigation on donating eggs to perceive how temperature influences the hatchlings.
As Khelifa led the experiment, he saw a dragonfly being pursued by another close to a lake, according to Newsweek. The one being pursued suddenly collided with the ground and lay unmoving on its back. The chaser drifted over the body of the other dragonfly for a couple of minutes before taking off.
He noticed that the crash "victim" was a female A. juncea while the pursuer was a male. "Topsy-turvy is an atypical posture for a dragonfly ... I expected that the female could be oblivious or even dead after her crash arrival, however she surprised me by flying endlessly rapidly as I drew nearer," Khelifa related.
Shocked at what he saw, Khelifa thought about whether the crash-and-death situation was a planned trick to abstain from getting pressured into mating. To grasp what he saw, the zoologist watched more moorland hawkers in the months that took after.
Months of observing the dragonflies made Khelifa understand that the impossible to miss situation he saw was quite normal among females of the A. juncea species. In order to comprehend why the female dragonflies would turn to faking their own particular deaths, the zoologist investigated the species' reproductive behavior.
What Khelifa found was that male moorland hawkers typically just stick around to constrain females into mating then take off a short time later, leaving the females helpless as they lay eggs. This is dissimilar to other dragonfly species whose guys would stand watch to ensure the females as they lay eggs. The study titled "Faking death to keep away from male pressure, extraordinary sexual clash resolution in a dragonfly" was distributed in the diary Ecology.