VIKING ADULT, MAY 2014Even more infamous is the traumatic insemination that is practiced by cimicids, blood-feeding bugs to which also Cimex lectularius, the common bedbug, belongs. Unforgettable to anyone who has ever been unlucky enough to spend several nights in bedbug-infested sleeping quarters, they will be truly memorable once you have learned about their sex lives. Living in densely packed colonies in crevices near the sleeping place of their “host,” sexual encounters are frequent, quick, and literally stabs in the dark. Bedbug researcher Mike Siva-Jothy of Sheffield University says: “When a female has not fed, she can avoid copulating males. But when’s fed and bloated, she’s a sitting duck. There’s no courtship—it’s brutal in every sense of the word.”
Males find their mates by a simple sit-and-wait strategy. Whenever anything resembling an engorged female lumbers past, a male bedbug will climb her right flank, push ahead until his head falls over her left shoulder, and then forcefully drive his syringe-like penis into her. (Ironically, the “penis” is actually a modified paramere, the brush-like organ that in other insects is used for gentle tapping and stroking.) Although the female has a perfectly fine vagina located at her rear end, this is of no interest to the male, as the vagina’s only reproductive function is to lay eggs, not to receive any sperm. Instead, the male injects his sperm directly into the female’s body by poking his penis through her skin on the right-hand side of ...
