of international efforts to tackle these problems haven't worked. ceasefire agreements have broken into pieces. the you and biggest at a peacekeeping mission has largely failed in the menu, the images of the time being just to ensure a level or level to keep on coming. each and every time means that there are the prospect. so is the, at least a little hope. so the congo who needs a democratic, legitimate government that is respected and given legitimacy by the team is still yeah, and i've been, you'll need to help for a better future, a bright future. the government has to involve the local population in managing these resources to the city school. so that seems like wishful thinking for now. one of the longest running conflicts on a looks set to continue and others won't start processing from the countries, which is the

there are an estimated 10 quintillion bucks on earth. and all those bugs need to have sex, sex in, but it isn't fascinating. recess, counter intuitive, ridiculous, and it's complexity ridiculous and how it stream it is. and most people know nothing about it. they do things like we do, but they do it in ways that are really different than the way we do it. spiders from transfer organs are not connected to then going as it's

a perfect opportunity to say, hey, here's how evolution works underneath that. as a supplemental for, but it's just a little blog spun and he stretched it into her reproductive tract. you know, the best answer to almost any question is it's complicated. i guess when i think about bugs, sex, i wonder why everyone is in studies. expensive is just fascinating. one of my favorite moments in science, when you think you really understand something, but really you don't understand anything. the, the 1st thing to understand about studying bug sex is how you actually studies bugs sex. it starts by being a kind of a bug. boy, you're this face to look. yeah. and then just kind of sitting here. yeah.

i mean, i watch a lot of animals not have sex. lou. yeah, i see right there. we are starting to get a little nervous now, but we haven't decided it's time to if you don't hear them by now, turn says we gotta move on to good for now till you can see the female has climbed on top, but in the wrong direction. yeah, nope, and now she's just now, so over the moment is going we do a lab here in the animal behavior course study for years and guaranteeing students get a pair of treat crickets in front of them in the lab on a piece of flour like this and they're gonna see 6 the nature is amazing and what it generates in

terms of diversity. and it's the same thing, goes for, for the meeting game in nature. there's a just a wealth of different diversities out there that lead to the evolution of, as you say, all these weird and wonderful ways of doing it. these tree crickets are having pretty common intimate relations for the above the world. the male calls to the female by rubbing his wings together. that's his cool. yeah. it's a truly noise. she is attracted to the song, crows up on his body. but then comes to the part where he transfers is firm. you see, just for matter, for little white things, the whole bunch of insects and calculate their sperm in some way. and it's called a spar matter for their sort of ejaculated internally because they have to surround the jacket with this amount of for casing. we entomologist like to comments from out of foreplay this from out of for just like a turkey based or where the male wines are a little tube into her reproductive tract. and then the actual them fold of the

spring matter for it basically score expand the spring into the female slowly over the next probably half hour or so. well, just for me out of 4 is doing its job. the mail needs to keep his partners attention. so she just doesn't wander off partly inseminated. so how does he do that? well, there's this small gland just under his wings on his back. that produces something she wants. it's just like a pit. it is thorax, and it's covered by the wings. and then when he sings, of course he lifts his 4 wings one way or and it's basically exposed to that point and she's proceeding to feed on that little biological, simple gland at the base of his wings. there's proteins and it's very important to who we predict the fitness. she plays more rags, the more she eats truly, like a little harder for her. so the casing pull,

the spring akeelah is eaten by the female. once is drained, she just spends around flux it off to go eat sperm, free dessert. that was some spaces. it looks all the world like. one looks around a cheese on a pizza is 6 or so diverse as the years go by. we're coming up with more more novel assistance, new inspect systems that do bizarrely different things we want to think about how it is that males attract females in the 1st place. there's song, there's dances, there's chemicals. there's all sorts of different ways that males try to entice females to approach them or meet with them. we're actually looking for some really large cricket like things or softer ends that makes these woods sing at night. singing is one word for it. can you hear that shrill by broad noise?

that's the call of the local crickets near hidden alberta. they go by many names, the greek is civil doris. it's also called the great greek. but we're going to go with the best nickname, the monster haglund. and when the sun goes down, the males get really, really loud, the, they make really loud sounds that are different from regular crickets in certain ways over the higher frequency. and they seem to invest a lot of energy and in producing the sounds. generally speaking in these kinds of, of animals like crickets, the males make a sound and a females follow it to find the mail. and then that's how they started courting and potentially made it. but um, with these animals, the answers are hard to come by. so put

a microphone close to the animal and measure it. they come in around a $105.00 decibels. and for comparison, the fire alarm system in this building is your piercing the loud. it's designed to penetrate to whatever room you're in and the fire alarm system is around 90 d b. i've, i've got to notice in my left ear and it's at this frequency. it's one of those workplace hazards. so they're really loud. but these scientists haven't been able to determine yet whether the volume of their calls is directly related to meeting. so it was really difficult in early studies of these guys to get the females to respond in a typical way. they didn't seem to pay any attention to the sound. it's not totally clear what information is the best care in the south. so we started studying what the hell is going on with that? just take one of these. if you grab the bugs, put them in here and the, the jobs are fairly strong, so it's better to catch me and maybe on,

on friday. and andrew mason are a bug sex power couples. she's an evolutionary biologist. and he studies, bug acoustics and behavior. it's surprising how many people are part of a couple where both of them are doing some sort of research working on the same types of critters. we were both interested in basically the libido hogs. it's kind of a match made in, but you haven't, i guess it's kind of median and andrew both teach at the university of toronto, scarborough back in ontario and they've drafted this crew to collect monster hag lives in the alberta bush. yeah, that monster, head woods are big. they look like they're covered in summer, i armor is not adapted for meeting as much as for combat. the. it turns out that the males have a really kind of aggressive territorial behavior where they basically claim

a tree and thing from that tree. you get to males on the same street the same time and then they'll often fight and one of them gets basically kicked out of the tree. a louder salad is the stronger effect it reaches farther. more of your rivals are going to hear it. so that could lead to the evolution of louder and louder sounds. if there's a benefits to being heard by more of your, of your arrival. if a male monster hedwood can hear his rivals call, then presumably so can the females. what does this racket actually attract them? it's possible that the, the broadcast from the females point of view and he just needs to identify that the tree is occupied. so there is a male in this tree. if he's got a tree,

he's fought off rivals in some sense to hold the street. that's enough to make it worth going up and evaluating him. is it possible made this male monster hegel is following the meeting script. he's done his bed by securing his tree, or in this case, his log. now he'll call and call and call, hoping for a female to come along with an answer. at some point, the female will show interest in the mail. the mail will start to to his courtship of routine during court ship. the mails will allow the females to, to, on a set of flushing pads hidden under their main wings side. those pads are a natural gift, a nutritious present that sweetens the meeting deal. while the male transfers has for matter for the female feeds on his blood the but today the females are either not hungry

or simply not interested the other male. on the other hand. so sometimes when mails are fighting, they'll start the same sex and sexual behavior. i don't know why it happens, but i want to know in so many instances, the study of bugs and sex feels like a new frontier of science. even though charles darwin wrote about insect meeting and reproduction in the 19th century, one of the most common answers, bug sex biologist give is. yeah, i don't know what to compare with. most of us don't know anything about them. i don't know. i don't know the this is he low on the big island of hawaii. it's a place where

a sea turtle share the pacific shore with humans and the small port city buses with daytime activity. what is night falls? a whole other world wakes up. are these specific fields crickets or wandering this urban lawn looking for someone to have sex with? one of the most interesting things about insects is that they're so different from people. and yet they're so abundant and so variable that almost anything you can find or think of an insect will illustrate. and i think what that helps us do is stop getting so hung up on the idea that life has to be a certain way. and that the way humans do things is the only way to do them. marlene look is an evolutionary biologists and a behavioral ecologist and the pacific deal. crickets have got her attention several years ago on another hawaiian island. marlene discovered that

a lot of the male crickets had gone completely quiet. if you see a lot of crickets, but you don't hear any calling, then there must be something wrong because one cricket you're out and you see them and it's night they should be calling. but if you don't hear calling, then you shouldn't see any crickets, but i've seen crickets, but it wasn't green calling. so what happened? marlene learned that the cricket call for sex had become a form of fatal attraction. it wasn't just female crickets, hearing the call. it was also being picked up by a parasitic fly that zeroed in on the same sound and drops sticky wriggling lar bike onto the male crickets backs. and when they get onto a cricket, they can burrow inside. and then they start wending their way inside the body of the cricket, while the cricket is still alive and eating what a student of mine used to call the gooey beds. and then they'll gradually start eating more major organs and eventually the cricket dies. when the fly larva is big

and it kind of burst out the, it was a crickets more hold of. lemme signal for search, but risk getting it. todd by a parasite, marlene her husband john roddenberry, and her grad student archer, toddy are scanning this lawn and he, lo, doing the cricket census. here's another female. they're looking for male crickets, whose wing structures have suddenly changed, rendering them silent. an evolutionary fix that prevents the flies from finding them that had spread incredibly rapidly for the population, say 5 years, 3 to $4.00 generations a year. so we're talking at max 20 generations, which is really, really fast from the standpoint of evolution. it is one of the fastest takeovers by

mutation ever witnessed by scientists. the flattened wings effected almost all of the male pacific field crickets on the island of hawaii, and about half on the island of a walkthrough. now there, seeing if disputation from normal wings to flat wings, this happened here on hawaii's big island. okay. give me a 2nd. this is a flat way. the yeah, it is can, wow. they weren't able to call, not because they were behaviorally refraining from calling. but because their wings didn't have the apparatus that's necessary for producing a song, these males that i was finding didn't have any of those structures at all. and their wing superficial. he looked like female wings. this is a normal wing cricket. you can see the light reflecting off the swirling complex wing structure that allows this mail to call for a mate. and this is the mutation a flat ring. you can see that it's well flat and it's rendered this little male

silent and a lot harder for potential female made to find as this drastic change changes, not just the males ability to think, but it changes the females environment that they are now. and because they're suddenly, they don't know that they're all of these males around them that they could potentially meet with because they couldn't hear them. so what's interesting to me is that it's like the loss of a sexual signal and that's quite startling because it would be as if all the peacocks in the world woke up one morning and found out that their tales have disappeared. which we would probably notice more than we noticed the crickets at any given time, there are trillions of crickets to live on earth. and yet, none of them generates much fear in the hearts of humans. it's different when it comes to spiders. a lot of people simply can't stand them, but the world of spiders and sex is so fascinating. you might even forget that you ate them. if there is one thing,

most people seem to know about bug sax. it's that there are times when one of the partners ends up dead. so in pop culture, the black widow is shumate since she kills right. then they apply that level to humans who are murderers and etc. well, in the species males that let females kill them can actually produce more babies. then males, if i try to avoid that outcome, what you are watching is a red black male doing what's called the summer salt. after he is inseminated, the much larger female, he flips himself into her open jaws. if the female chills the male, she's less likely to meet again. and she also actually takes in more of the males firm to use to fertilizer eggs in the future. it's better for that now. you might make it easier for the female to kill you if her eating. you actually can give you

more eggs or give you an edge of competition with other males. but just because the males of one black widow species offer themselves up as a post of meeting supper, it doesn't mean all species do people tend to latch onto the really bizarre pieces of the behavior. so sexual cannibalism is, is lowered. it's kind of exciting and weird, but in fact, it really doesn't happen as often as we think. there's some species in which one a female is really hungry. she'll eat the mail, but in fact, males can smell, but they're hungry and try to avoid them. the one we're constantly talking about jenna tale. yeah. and, and having conversations you know at the pub about spiders, jenna. tell you are breaking. and so yes, you definitely do happen to have to have a sense of humor about it. yeah,

this beach is on the south 1st nation traditional territory near san it's on vancouver island. catherine scott did her ph. d here under the guidance of media. and on friday the female black widows make their nests among the driftwood. catherine and her partner, doctor sean mccann, have spent several summer seasons here. tracking the movements and behaviors of the local black widow colonies. the i was terrified of spiders. up until the 1st day that i started working with them. when i was about 25 years old, i started working in the laboratory with black widows, and i immediately fell in love with them. as soon as i started to look more closely at them and to observe their behavior and understand their communications systems, i've just found them fascinating. the females construct elaborate

labs around their layers that work is both communication systems and traps. she's pulling so kind of her spinner. it went through last periods, legs and throwing sticky glue onto the grasshopper to subdue it. and then once she's comfortable with the fact that it's not going to jump away, then she'll move in for a bite, and she'll inject it with a little bit of venom. so a male black widow needs to figure out how to not end up like that. grasshopper. spiders tend to use chemical signals. and you can think of them like a, uh, an airborne personal add the female. and mets this chemical cocktail that travels through the air and mailed or able to detect spots with sensory organs on their feet. and they can get information about the female from those chemicals,

and determine whether she's a female of the correct b c's. whether she's made it before and even whether or not she's hungry, which is important for blackwood, ohs. so they're not navigating. using an expensive site, they're navigating completely by smiling. so the mail will climb up some vegetation and then at the top to pause. and he'll waive his 1st pair of legs around like this very slowly. and he'll kind of turn and wave the legs. and he's tasting the air with the sensory organs on the tips of his legs. and if he catches the width of a females personally add that chemical signal that she's admitting from her web. he'll get a read on where that sense is coming from. and he'll move in the drawing section of the signal that he detected. and as he's moving around the environment, excuse trailing, a smoke safety line behind him, we call that a drag line. and so that drag line silk and ends up connecting the tips of the

blades of grass or other vegetation that he's been climbing up to get his bearings . and so he leave it behind him. sort of a smoke highway connecting the vegetation and other males are all doing the same thing. if he encounters that smoke dr. glen, up another mail, he's just gonna run along as fast as he can. and eventually, end up overtaking that 1st mail, or arriving at the web that he has found. and so the males are using this as sort of a short cut to find females or quickly arrive before the 1st male has had a chance to meet back in the lab, a male looks like he might get a chance to have sex. he's still potentially in danger at any moment. the looming female might make this a dinner date, but it's a risk he seems willing to take. if it means his jeans, get a chance to move ahead. one more generation, the males have these appendages on the front of their body, their,

their sort of smaller leg like appendages called petty pumps. all spiders have them, but in males, they're modified for sperm transfer. they often look like the mail is wearing boxing gloves or mittens. in front of his face. and so the mail when he is mature and he's just about ready to meet. he builds a special little web called a sperm lab. he deposits a droplet of sperm onto that lab, and then he sucks it up into his petty pumps. and he use that uses the more or less like turkey based or is to, to then transfer this firm into the female. once he is on top of the female there in the meeting position, he is ready to start specify firm into her seminar receptacles. his, his little turkey based or petty pops to expand and deflate and expand and deflate as the pumps seminal fluid into the female. and that can go on for about 15 minutes . and then finally, when he withdraws that symbolist, the tip will break off. and if he breaks it off in just the right spot,

it will block the opening to the females from storage, oregon, and prevent subsequent males from inseminate anchor. now you might be asking why the mail would try to block his mates genital tract after the deed is done. it's because the sex is not over yet. that is the pendulum, it's called. the general structure is located in here. so we cut around that term, move it. the female block, little spider has to receptacles where she can store the sperm. these structures are hardened and they can holds firm for the females entire life span following a single meeting. the trick for the mail though, is to fill them both. if the only access is one of them, another mail can come along and fill up the 2nd. and if he doesn't block the

receptacle, he did a jackie late into another mail. could mix a sperm in there too. so this is from competition. when females meet with more than one male, this firm actually competes inside the female for access to the ag. so it's competition, one stage after meeting which is kind of amazing is so females success and in evolutionary sense depends on her having as many babies as possible. she will produce like an exact, with a $100.00 to $200.00 eggs, twice a month for the rest of her life. we're talking about 10000 or more off spring in their life time. and so when a male manages to meet with a female, even if he's killed, if he never gets another shot, his reproductive output is actually pretty high. so we've seen that when it comes to bug fix, the males need to employ different strategies to get the females to make with them gifts broken genitals scales even allowing themselves to be all to make sure their genes make it through to one more generation. pretty straightforward,

right? not so much just when you think you've got it figured out the when i was studying at the university, i had gotten specialized 90 mile behavior. and i went to the classes and i saw that every scene was focused in males behavior where missing half of the story when i came for the 1st time in the lab was have only one women. that was one of my supervisors. and all the rest where men fortunately around the 90s, i know that something change in science much more we men started at starting a new model behavior. and we start finding things that were different. standing and

showing that the females have already active. females can be more mobile than males . females can be the carting sex, and they can display very close speak was a behaviors during guard ship about a decade ago. and neither was studying a species of wolf spiders called our cause. she noticed the female accost. those were acting differently than other walls spiders. so the female seemed to be the ones out on the prowl for a partner, not the males. this wasn't in the science books. so anita captured some potential meeting pairs and put them in a true area. they immediately dug deep burrows in the sand and waited. when i placed the female i saw the female and went to the bureau entrance. the bureau insurance was closed. she opened the bureau entrance where the maid was there

waiting and she started carting sheet. she faced the mail and started moving at her front legs and in front of the main, on the main responded making somebody say, who i'd say for and i remember the night that i saw on the 1st interaction, it was like one of my favorite moments to say is when you think you really understand something really you don't understand anything, but you say, oh this is larissa, female. it became known as completely different to most of the status in spite of the coastline of uruguay is a wild network of expansive features in san diego. the wildlife is stunning from the larger mammals to the smaller bugs on shore. the

spider country spiders represent many things that i am very fond of the arms tuesday, leaving the dark. and many people hate them or afraid of them. you know, as a teenager, i was completely rambling. i think starting spiders, it's like being a rebel to and showing that being different can be something nice and good. the . it's late winter in uruguay, and a need us. our costs are out on the sand, leaving their burrows to hunt for food. anita has just spotted a female scurrying into a burrow. your soul is so hard. so i can see the domain

of somebody actually is there it was thing how did by a female? probably she had mated there. that laurel was constructed by a, by uh, by her previous partner. maybe there was something like, um, mail order, that is it attract. so the female um, probably the 2nd female i was looking for a potential 6 road partner back in the lab. the alec costs a male spiders have taken up residence in some true areas. in general rounds males that construct and long morals a are ready for meeting. but it depends on who the 16 also. because remember the actual seat in the speech. this is where the meeting dance gets

complicated. ideally, the mail will approve of the visiting female and the female will like his birth. the borough is an actual gift, like the food gifts among danced, lies, or the glandular secretions between the crickets. in this case, the gift is a place to have sex and lay eggs. that is, if everything goes well, she will started opening the bureau, enters and leaning into the bottle and she would perform coaching waving the 1st look they're facing the main. the main mate, the female performs body shaking when she wants to have lower ejaculations from the me and the middle response. it's like they were talking to each other

in japan, police does not go outside the border line on the worst case doing this. now when the main subject you listen, you can see the hairs from the legs raised and go down every time the checking in to the race. so you can call the number of nations by upsets just one. it looked like this was a successful encounter. disaster meeting turns into murder. as the males suddenly decides to cannibalize the female, the, the, the boys, the, it's crazy and it's magic also. it's better than watching any

fields. i'm always very emotional when, when i see the female, like going around this being so acting that initiating the car coupon, approaching the males. despite that they know it's dangerous. but attacking the female after meeting it was really weird. there's no getting around it. sexual cannibalism is pretty shocking, especially when the male spider appear to have committed to inseminate in his new partner before he ate or the percentage competition bug sex can be pretty rough. but it's a sex after all, something most often considered not awful. is there any way of knowing if folks can actually find pleasure with sex the, the university of delaware,

in these hallowed halls of higher learning, there is a bug biologist who is really into the sex lives of fruit flies. okay, i've got my flies. the supplies are a popular bug when it comes to science. for decades, they've been the stars of genetic research, partly because they share around 75 percent of the genes we humans carry around. also male fruit flies. ejaculations are epic. they have incredibly long sperms. in fact, it can be 20 times the size of the little guys body. and that's actually related to a structural selection. because longer sperm will be stored in the female reproductive organs for longer time. but fruit flies are the bug world's most popular lab rats, because it's really easy to get them to have sex. yeah, sure. so we have interest in their short lives are driven by 2 main things,

food and sex. a lot like us. of course the we are driven by many, many other things, but we are still, i am all right. we are driven by food and the we are driven by sex. they are extremely important. and so, and the most individual survival and the survival of the species. so evolution basically therefore our brain mama, she will proceed with these important and meaningful stimuli as rewarding. we don't know anything about the cognitive experience of bonds really. but if it exists, they should find pleasure in things that allow them to reproduce. if organisms feel pleasure in things that increase their reproductive output, they will do better over emulation every time. and so pleasure essentially ends up as a tool of appalachian wherever my

versions. so these are all version females. and we have the males separated, isolated in these smaller glass awhile. now i'm going to load the mail. so how do you find out if fruit flies enjoys sex? leesha was part of a research team that genetically manipulated mail flies. they train them to a jackal aid in response to red light. given the choice they gather under the light of fruit fly, pleasure palace with orgasms. aplenty. we found that if that relation is rewarding to my house and that's how the mail has got the 2nd row, it works. but it's all auditory where like, because we didn't give them anything wages activate,

it might be an artificial reward, but don't tell these fruit flies. they're having a great time all by themselves. as the red light gives them the green light to ejaculate. but this scenario was fabricated in a lab and it only partly answered the question about whether the flies feel pleasure or not. so science has been decided to give the male flies a choice between their 2 favorite things, sex and alcohol. in that border sex as a reward, but have sex doesn't materialize. there's always alcohol to ease the pain of rejection. slice favorite for this alcohol in the form and to the fruits and the males for rich ask you the by females, they want to elevate their level of reward. so they consume more alcohol as, as a reduction but a male who had successfully made it was not interested in alcohol. afterwards. that

indicated that all love is not equal, but the males got more enjoyment from sex than they did from booze. but what about the females? where's the fun for them? as we've already heard with other studies, a bugs, much less is known about females because no one seriously looked into their sexual behavior until recently, or studies of male through fly behavior. take back to the early, 19 hundreds systematic study on a female portion behavior i think starts maybe 2013. and so that meant that people missed a whole chunk of what was going on in nature. there's a whole world of effects, so that arise from female reproductive decisions that affect males and it affected the evolution of the traits of entire speech. really ok. another adult males. these are all live ones by the way, back in hawaii,

marlene soc, is coming through the crags of bulky, know, national park to join you ready to start checking them off. trying to fill in the many blanks and the story of another bug, the little known and little understood lab, a cricket the initial work that was done on the conclusion was that these are really calling us to come out on lava after there's been interruption. and then they disappear after some period of time as a lot of it gets vegetated. and so obviously, if that's true then and there, that kind of transient then, you know, how are you going to really do a study on of the 2nd thing, of course is there, nocturnal, the 3rd thing is that they don't have any wings. and so if you can't hear them, i mean, i'm certainly learning now that you know, there is a reason why we don't know that much of we know they must make because we get babies and there's males and females. but um,

i don't know anything about them. so guess what is complicated, or there is so much we don't know. there are potentially sexual behaviors out there in bug worlds that if they ever get discovered, will totally challenge our understanding of reproduction and evolution. even more than the ones we already know about. but maybe we make it even more complicated by letting our own perceptions of sex get in the way of what is actually happening in nature. perhaps because in humans reproduction is often cooperative and that idea has, has sort of blood into a popular understanding of the evolution of behavior and structures. and it's just not true. and that really can be revealed to us through looking at something like insects, where it's all about individual competition to transfer the most changed into the next generation. but sax drive,

some of the most extreme and rapid add up stations that we've seen in nature, which means that sometimes we can actually documented almost in real time like you can't make it out. you can't make it out. remember there are 10 quintillion bugs on earth and we barely scratch the surface of all the things they get up to the

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respect the, this is the dw news and these are off top stories. the spanish government has declared 3 days of morning for the victims of flood thing that's hit the east of the country school. so people are dead with the number increasing all the time off to torrential rain spots flash floods in the region of valencia. us vice presidents, cumberland harris has spent one of the final days of campaigning, trying to, with voters in swing states including north carolina where she spoke at the valley .