Reading about aphids on wikipedia, and I have been completely terrified and confounded by their life cycles and reproductive strategies. Apparently, females born from an egg in the spring become pregnant with tiny clones of themselves that they give live birth to as first-instar nymphs, which themselves repeat this process many times, sometimes migrating between a primary and secondary host plant, and then at the end of the year the last batch of female clones decide to start producing sexual-reproduction-capable males and females which go on to lay eggs that hatch in the spring. Oh, and did I mention that during this process the tiny clones of one female already contain an egg cell that will develop into their own daughter, all while they're still in the ovaries? And what constitutes a "male" for these nutjobs is "a clone of me but I'll leave out one of the sex chromosomes."
Worker bees also do that if the queen dies: one of them will begin producing queen pheromones, and start laying eggs. More eggs than a healthy queen: several in a honeycomb cell, and she can't get them to the bottom of the honeycomb cell because her ass is too short to reach all the way down there. Also, because she never had sex all her unfertilized eggs will be haploid male drones, which don't contribute to the colony's workforce because they come pre-programmed to find a queen. And there are none, so they sit there and eat the colony's stocks until all the workers die of old age and they starve to death shortly thereafter. But the entire time the workers are like "nope, everything is fine here!" Bane of all beekeepers.
And then apparently there's these mites that live and develop inside their mother. 1 of the offspring is a male, and the other 6-7 are female. They then proceed to have wonderful inside-their-mother's-womb incest, then eat their mother alive from the inside out. Even the male bothers to eat his mum, even though he's destined to die a few hours later, and all his sisters he fucked are going to suffer their mother's fate in four days.
Fuck you nature. Why isn't basic sexual reproduction good enough for you? And what the hell is the deal with arthropods!?
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Topic: Things that made you absolutely terrified today (Read 1982369 times)