A recent Sydney study looking at the mating behaviour of the Australian plague locust has found that reproducing has a particularly high cost. The rate at which locusts are targeted by a predatory species—the black digger wasp—increases significantly during sex.
“The startling aspect of these data is that copulation magnified the risk of wasp-mediated death by up to 10 per cent and this happened at a time of maximum reproductive potential for the locusts.”
The digger wasp is a parasite that stings and paralyses its prey before dragging it off to a burrow to be buried and eaten alive. It excavates living larders for its larvae, stocking them with the bodies of paralysed insect prey.
Darrell Kemp, Macquarie University
http://www.mq.edu.au/newsroom/control.php?page=story&item=4787&category=research