Scientist, Environmental Reporter Nifong Beetles

I picked on Lewis Smith, environmental reporter for the Times Online, for the contrast between two articles in Global Warming - Now Good For Animals! Now he’s Nifonging innocent beetles.

“The females don’t want to mate. You could say they always have a headache,” said Johannes Bergsten, of the Natural History Museum.

“There’s no courtship for these beetles. It’s a system of rape. But the females don’t take things quietly. They evolve counter-weapons.”

Any foreplay between the beetles is limited to the female desperately trying to dislodge the male by swimming fran-tically around the pond.

Males that manage to hang on wait until the female is exhausted by the underwater struggle and then mate.

The male will keep hold of the female, occasionally allowing her to the surface to breathe, for up to six hours to prevent her mating, however unwillingly, with any other beetles.

Systematic rape for reproduction and a co-evolving battle of the sexes have been suspected in a handful of insects but the study of diving beetles is the first to show an evolutionary arms race across an entire genus.

Has the scientist or the reporter interviewed these females? Have the police taken statements so the rapes can be prosecuted? There are no direct quotes from the victims in the article; how does he know they were unwilling? Snark aside, anthropomorphization is best left to Disney and Pixar. Smith’s commenters provide some nice take-downs:

This is startlingly ignorant science reporting and political bias.
All species have some means of testing the male for vigour before he is allowed to mate.
This is as evdent here as in any other species.
To call this “rape” is absurd bogus anthropomorphism.
There is no “battle of the sexes” but a battle between males for which have the most vigour.
This is rooted in the essential sex difference: that the male acts as a ‘filter’ for the genetic material of the whole lineage; this because the male is the ‘limiting factor’ in reproduction. The males take out of the gene pool gene replication errors, and also segregate for retention enhancing genetic material.

It is always alarming how scientifically illiterate is news reporting of science.
And, of course, scientists themselves angle synposes of their work to fit with the media agenda: which is always virulently anti-male.

steve moxon, sheffield,

“A beetle that never wants to get pregnant has overturned one of Charles Darwin’s theories…”

The need to reproduce is incorporated into a desire of the parent for their offspring to survive. As this survival is most probable when a female mates with the fittest male, a female will develop methods to select between the males in terms of a particular trait, whether colour, strength or length of eye-stalks. A male, however, often maximises reproductive success by mating with many females, so a male will be selected on to overcome female defences. So in fact the Acilius genus do NOT contradict any evolutionary theories, but instead emphasise the remarkable complexity of evolution and natural selection.

This report is guilty of deliberately misleading the public in the cause of sensationalism, and demonstrates why science communication should be undertaken only with understanding of the topic. Science can be brilliant and very exciting without “spicing up” the findings.

Lucy Sandbach, Colchester, UK

It’s not a month since the Times informed us that bdelloid rotifers had too many teeth or some such nonsense thus ‘overturning Darwinian Theory’. Perhaps the Theory of evolution could be used to generate electricity since it seems to turn over completely with every minor biological discovery reported.

George, La Rochelle, France

Bwahahaha!!

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