Faking Your Death Isn't Just A Way To Ditch Violent Drug Smugglers Who Are On Your Tail
It's a ploy by female dragonflies to ditch underappealing suitors looking for some, uh, tail.

Sandrine Ceurstemont writes at NewScientist:

Female dragonflies use an extreme tactic to get rid of unwanted suitors: they drop out the sky and then pretend to be dead.

Rassim Khelifa from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, witnessed the behaviour for the first time in the moorland hawker dragonfly (Aeshna juncea). While collecting their larvae in the Swiss Alps, he watched a female crash-dive to the ground while being pursued by a male.

The female then lay motionless on her back. Her suitor soon flew away, and the female took off once the coast was clear.

...He observed 27 out of 31 females plummeting and playing dead to avoid males, with 21 of these ploys successful. Plunging at high speed is risky though, and according to Adolfo Cordero-Rivera at the University of Vigo in Spain, it may be a strategy that they use only in areas with lots of dragonflies. "Females may only behave in this way if male harassment is intense," he says.

One thing that's fascinating in evolution is the co-evolution of sexes with competing strategies or competing organisms.

Note that not all of the ploys to avoid the males were successful. Chances are, over evolutionary time, the smartypants male dragonflies -- the ones who go, "Hmm, bet you're shitting me on this plop, I'm dead business -- are the ones that will pass on their genes the most, along with the "I think you're shitting me" adaptation.

RELATED: Lady spiders eat sex-blind males.

Just like in humans and other species where females have the biggest investment from sex, females are the choosier sex (Robert Trivers' theory of parental investment). Yes, I'm talking about spiders -- male jumping spiders -- whose "if it moves on eight legs, try to fuck it" lack of discrimination in partner choice can prove fatal. From University of Florida:

Male jumping spiders will try to mate with any female, but that lack of discretion could cost them their lives, says a University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences researcher.

In a newly published study, UF/IFAS entomologist Lisa Taylor and her team documented the courting techniques of jumping spiders. They found that male spiders spend much time and energy - including singing and dancing -- trying to mate with potential females, even when these females are the wrong species.

"We think that one reason these displays have evolved in male jumping spiders is to compensate for the fact that they can't tell females of closely related species apart," Taylor said. "Males run around courting everything that looks remotely like a female, and they place themselves at a very high risk of cannibalism from hungry females of the wrong species who have no interest in mating with them."

The paper -- by Lisa A. Taylor, Erin C. Powell, and Kevin J. McGraw -- is here, in PLOS One: Frequent misdirected courtship in a natural community of colorful Habronattus jumping spiders.

Spiders via @SteveStuWill; dragonflies via @thedaysbetween