Cheated

Inside left

Inside Right

The sleeve notes from back cover

The evolutionary dilemma of the praying mantis rests on the eagerness of the female to eat anything, including the male. How one gets by that problem in a sexually reproducing species I submit to psychiatrists as a knotty one. Evolution, however, has come up with an answer and, grisly though it be, it works. The female is endowed with poorer eyesight than the male, and she can see him only when he moves. But he has the eye of an eagle concerning what she is up to, whether washing her wings or grooming her insect-equivalent of eyebrows before an insect-equivalent mirror. In the time of sexual heat she of course attracts him, but the long history of the species has equipped the male with inhibitions

concerning his consort’s less attractive qualities. He approaches her, compelled. But a turn of her head in his direction freezes him. He has the capacity to stand without motion, perhaps with one leg lifted, for an hour or more. And, so posed, he remains invisible to her. Sooner or later she will lose interest and return to the diversions of the powder room. And he will make another foray.

That sex can be a dangerous game requires no comment. Back in the 1930’s, however, a zoologist named Karl Roeder became so impressed by praying mantis relations that he made an elaborate study of the neurological arrangements making survival of the species possible. For while the male, with a final leap, may secure himself on her back unnoticed, there to proceed with copulation, a fair chance exists that he will fail. At the last instant she will glimpse his movement, seize him with her deceptively named forelegs, and begin to eat him. She begins always by chewing off his head.

Having lost his head, he literally loses all fear of her. Roeder found that the centre of inhibition lies in the male’s brain, while the sexual drive has its centre in the abdomen. Headless, abandoned freely to the sexual compulsion, he wrenches from her grasp, mounts her back where she cannot see him, and copulates. Then slowly he will weaken, lose his grip,

and die. When he slides off to the ground, she will discover him again and finish eating him.

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT by Robert Ardrey.

PUBLISHERS ‘Collins Publishers’.