Lernpause

Ja, ich weiß, ich sollte lieber lernen anstatt zu surfen, und ich setze mich auch bestimmt gleich wieder an den Schreibtisch, aber der Artikel war einfach zu faszinierend:

Across the eastern United States, a gruesome ritual is in full swing. The praying mantis and its relative, the Chinese mantis, are in their courtship season. A male mantis approaches a female, flapping his wings and swaying his abdomen. Leaping on her back, he begins to mate. And quite often, she tears off his head.

The female mantis devours the head of the still-mating male and then moves on to the rest of his body. “If you put a pair together and come back later, you’ll just find the wings of the male and no other evidence he was ever there,” said William Brown, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia.

[...]

Some sexual cannibals, including female Chinese mantises, actually eat a lot of males. “One study estimated that 63 percent of the diet of females are male mantids,” Dr. Brown said. “So they’re the main food source.” (NYT)

Und dabei wollte ich doch nur 15min im Ikea-Katalog blättern....