Praying Mantis Hangs Both Ways.

Greg Holwell, a researcher at Macquarie University in Australia, discovered that genitalia of male praying mantises hang either to the left or to the right:

Holwell travelled to Queensland hoping to study sexual cannibalism in praying mantises, or mantids. But he got more than he bargained for.

Rather than finding examples of females eating males, he found a unique case of dimorphism, where there are two distinct forms of a particular species.

He found the males of the species Ciulfina are identical except they have genitalia that are the mirror image of each another.

"Some males are essentially right handed or left handed in their genitalia," says Howell. "Their genitalia point in one direction or the other, which is a very unusual phenomenon."

Link (via Nutmeg)


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