After the shallow pit is cleaned, the female curls up and becomes a ball. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 ｉｎｆｏ

In this state, its defense is at its strongest, and it can effectively compensate for the decline in physical fitness caused by actions such as eating, sleeping, or laying eggs.

This time, it only lasted for half an hour, and when it unfolded again, a puff of pink gas suddenly erupted from its tail, scattering in the wind.

The female splattered four times in a row.

Stopped, its huge body lay still for a moment, and then slammed down on the pine tree in front of it. With his own majestic strength, he broke this old tree surrounded by several people. Climbing to the fallen canopy of the pine tree, the female begins to chew on pine needles and some twigs. For the following mating, it must eat more to maintain the necessary physical strength.

Just now, what it spewed out was the pheromone that summoned the male. This pink gas is no less attractive to the male insect than the smell of blood is to it. Males can be quite sluggish in their perception of the smell of blood.

In related experiments, Levi discovered this strange feature of them: in terms of olfactory senses, the ground helmet insects have dioeciousness.

As far as he knew, the ground helmets had at least three sensing abilities, namely smell, tremor perception, and infrared vision. At the point of smell, there is a clear differentiation between males and females.

Females focus on recognizing the smell of blood. At this point, it reaches terrifying heights. Levi once had people do experiments and found that under tailwind conditions, even if they were five or six kilometers apart, female insects could still identify the source of the smell of blood and could effectively track it. In comparison, males are much inferior. Even the most sensitive ones are limited to 100 meters.

What males are really interested in is precisely the pheromones emitted by the former. Like females, they can accurately track pheromones from several kilometers away.

Unfortunately, both male and female, this extraordinary sense of smell is limited to these two tastes.

Other smells, no matter how pungent, unique, or unforgettable, will simply fall on deaf ears.

Levi wasn't surprised by this. He knew that there was a moth on Earth that had a similar phenomenon.

Male moths can find unmated female moths up to 10 kilometers away when the wind is downwind and with their strong sense of smell. But at the same time, they can hardly perceive any other smell.

The reinforcement of paranoia on the one hand, at the cost of giving up on the other, is a special trade-off. The prosperity of its own population also proves that there is a reason for doing so.

It's a pity that they have encountered "scheming" humans.

Hearing the report from his subordinates that the female insect was already "haunted by red mist", Levi immediately got up from his seat, he took the telescope, pointed the lens barrel at the pine forest below, and glanced around.

Then, I looked up at the sky and found that although it was still dark, it was much better than before. Now, it must be time for the males to come out and feed.

Levi looked down again, and sure enough, in a corner to the east, he found some clues. There was a pure white snow, and suddenly there was a black line that twisted and uncertain, but the general direction remained unchanged. The direction of its extension is the open field where the female is located.

I'm waiting for you. Levi sneered.

Unlike the dignified female, the male helmet is much more obscene. Perhaps because they are much smaller than the former, they burrow into the ground like larvae when resting, rather than curling up and appearing on the surface.

At the same time, as soon as there is wind and grass, the first action of the male insect is to burrow into the ground, which is not at all as majestic as when hunting.

These behaviors make it difficult to find them.

If it weren't for the discovery of the secret of their reproduction, Li Weizhen would not have had a way to gather them on a large scale.

At this point, he prefers the style of the female worm.

Unlike their husbands, there are many female helmets, and in the face of any wind and grass, it is one word - "fight"!

Of course, the premise of this is that their combat effectiveness is far more powerful than that of male insects. In their environment, females are in the position of high-end predators, while males are much lower.

After discovering this black line, Levi looked around again, and sure enough, he found several more in succession.

There are really a lot of ground helmet insects in this forest, and after a while, so many of them have come out. It seems that this time it will be a big harvest. Levi withdrew his gaze and focused on the open area where the female was.

There are already two males around the female.

In contrast to the females, who reached a length of sixteen or seventeen meters, these later males were as short as dwarfs, and they were less than half the length of the females. If you walk side by side, people who don't know probably think they are the children of the latter.

At first, Levi was also taken aback by the moment he learned of their gap. He had a bad idea at that time: how did they live with such a big difference?

Later, when I learned the answer, I was really disappointed.

This thing is actually in vitro fertilization: when the female produces egg masses, the male worms are busy working on the egg masses to fertilize these eggs~. There was no ornamentation at all, he thought there was a very curious unfolding.

The female insect in the pine forest did not stop feeding because of the arrival of these two males. Under normal circumstances, it is at least a dozen males before they perform the mate selection ceremony.

Like most animals, the Helmetus is a larger parent of the female. They dedicate more time and energy to the development of offspring. For example, they dedicate more energy to the egg than the sperm of the male. After the fertilized eggs are born, they also have to devote a certain amount of time and energy to take care of them. Although the time is not long, only a dozen days. But compared to males, they are also a competent mother. After the latter finished mating, his first action was to eat and go away, which was quite irresponsible.

Efforts in this area will naturally pay off in other ways.

This reward is the right to choose. The parent invests in the larger side, and almost all of them will have the option to mate.

In particular, helmet insects are still strong and weak in males, and male insects want to overlord the bow, but they don't have this ability. Their small body is estimated to be unable to withstand a gentle bump from the female.

In this regard, Levi knew a lot, and he understood that there were three stages in their mating rituals.

In the first stage, the males are gathered, and the females give the first egg masses to the most powerful of them.

In the second stage, the unselected spare tire males are left to contribute something like food, and the females will choose to sacrifice the largest and best ones and give them a second batch of egg masses.

The final stage is the last batch of jack males, who can prolong the estrus period of the females by providing meat and even get a chance to mate.

The time he chose to attack was between the first and second phases. At this time, because of mating, both female and male helmets are at their most vulnerable.