TLS: Kleptoparasite

from Why be a kleptoparasite?
by Gaden S. Robinson

review of THE OTHER INSECT SOCIETIES. By James T. Costa. 767pp. Harvard University Press.

Females of the common European earwig Forficula auricularia may produce numerous clutches, sometimes from a single initial mating, as they are able to store sperm for long periods. These earwigs appear to buck the trend of the semelparity hypothesis -and male earwigs appear to play no part in care, their role being that of a mere mating machine. Males of two genera are curiously well adapted to this latter role for, remarkably, they have two penises, one kept as a spare.

Females of the Alpine earwig Anechura bipunctata are semelparous, and it is reported that females can and will pool their eggs and jointly provision the brood. They provide the longest span of maternal care found in any earwig, and stay with the nymphs for several instars and even to maturity. In the related Japanese species Anechura harmandi, however, maternal care is elevated to a whole new level of sacrifice, and having assisted and fed her nymphs through the first few days of life, the mother allows herself to be eaten by her brood, a process noted by Costa to be "the ultimate Head Start program". He notes that this is by no means as unconventional as the reproductive behaviour of the cecidomyiid fly Miastor:
whose young larvae hatch and consume their mother from within, before they are even "born". What makes this even more bizarre, however, is the fact that the mother itself is a larva. These flies are paedogenetic, "young-reproducing", where several generations of larvae are telescoped into one, the larvae of which reproduce without maturing and each of which consumes its larva -mother from within.

full article can be found here