A new study in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology finds that female fruit flies prefer to keep intercourse short because they get a reproductive boost from shorter sex.
Male fruit flies prefer sex to last longer, which leads to a struggle between the mating flies.
"After about a minute and a half (of mating), the female begins kicking and struggling," says Kirsten Klappert, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic
Science and Technology, one of the writers of the new fruit fly report.
Klappert notes that when mating lasts longer, female flies
have less time to mate again with a different male, if they do so at
all, which lowers the chance of new offspring, because many male fruit flys are infertile.
During the study, Klappert’s research team paired live males with dead
females to see how much control female flies have over mating length.
The dead insects were propped up to convince the males that they were still alive, and ready to mate. The team observed that male flies’ sex with the dead insects lasted 1.5 times longer than it did with live females.
The study's findings align with the belief that humans can relate to the female fruit fly’s
desires. University of Sheffield lecturer Rhonda Snook says ‘I don’t know you could say human
females want longer copulation, per se. It’s really the foreplay, not
the actual act of copulation. In the insects, prior to that, there’s
courtship going on, and that’s like foreplay in humans.’
