The male cockroach has found a parade for the female who rejects his advances

A close-up cockroach

The male has found the courtship in the rejection of sugar which normally allows him to attract the female: he modifies the composition of his offering to the one he is courting and he shortens the foreplay before moving on to the ;act, according to a study published on Wednesday.

By trying to bait cockroaches with sweet compositions, trap makers could not assume the consequences this would have on the strategies reproduction of the critter.

Did you know?

Commonly called cockroach in Quebec, the cockroach has several names. In Europe, it is called cockroach or cockroach, and in Haiti, ravet.

30 years ago, a study in the journal Science announced the & #x27;appearance of a strain of German cockroaches that have developed an aversion to glucose. Small in size, Blattella germanica, the most common species of cockroaches, nests in kitchens around the world.

The traps to eliminate him worked for a long time using his appetite for glucose, which came to coat a deadly substance. Some of the insects adapted by avoiding them.

The aversion of these to sugar had an impact, however, because this substance was initially as important for nutrition as it is for reproduction, notes the study published in the journal Proceedings B of the British Royal Society (in English) .

The male has a very particular tactic to curry favor with a female. It spreads its wings by secreting with a gland a nuptial juice based on maltose, a form of sugar. The female comes to taste it by climbing on her back, which gives the male time to connect his genitalia to that of his partner.

Females who developed an aversion to sugar to better avoid death traps also cut their lovemaking with males short, until those who shared that aversion found the parade, as explained ;study led by Ayako Katsumata, a researcher at the Urban Entomology Laboratory at the University of Raleigh, a pioneer in this field.

The male cockroach has developed two techniques to get his way.

It has changed the composition of its nuptial secretion, which contains five times less glucose than that of an ordinary cockroach, and especially two and a half times more maltotriose. This type of sugar has a double advantage: females are very fond of it, and it converts more slowly into glucose than maltose under the effect of the female's saliva.

Second parade: the male cockroach springs into action in an average of 2.2 seconds, almost twice as fast as the average cockroach, leaving no time for the female to convert some of its juice into glucose and thus shortening the preliminaries.

The big loser of the case is now the lambda male cockroach, which strives to produce a juice that is too rich in glucose and which , slow to conclude, is sent back to the ropes by the female when she realizes it.

The authors of the study point out that it Understanding how the sugar aversion trait spreads through the cockroach population is important if industry is to design effective insect control strategies.