As if bed bugs weren't already horrific enough, people are just now learning how they mate, and it truly is the stuff of nightmares.
If you've ever been unfortunate enough to have a bed bug infestation in your house or on holidays, you know just how vicious these little demon insects can be.
But there's one thing that bed bugs traumatise more than humans - and that's other bed bugs.
In today's fact that you'll wish you never knew: male beg bugs mate by a lovely little process called 'traumatic insemination'. And it's just as dreadful as it sounds.
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Unlike some animals, who like to court each other before they finally decide to mate, bed bugs waste absolutely no time showing off or getting to know their mate.
Instead, male bed bugs will essentially stab the female on the side of her body with its hypodermic genitals and release sperm into the hole he has left in her body.
Yep.
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Sperm then diffuses through the female's system until it reaches her ovaries.
Although the female's body is able to heal after the horrible 'stabbing', the open wound is susceptible to infection until then, so it can be a pretty deadly ritual for female bed bugs.
Thankfully for lady bed bugs - and all of us - evolution has provided the female species with a little pocket of spermicide on their right side - the side that males tend to stab most.
The spermicide pretty much stops the insemination in its tracks, and ensure that her body produces fewer eggs - fewer bed bugs for us!
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If this story didn't already have your skin crawling, you'll definitely start to feel an itch when I tell you that, despite her best efforts, the female bed bug will lay between one and five eggs per day - or 200 to 250 eggs in her lifetime.
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Like you and I, bed bugs can't tell the difference between male and female beg bugs. And, unlike the females, males don't have the strong exoskeleton or the spermicide to protect against a stabbing incident if another male gets the wrong idea.
Instead, they have an alarm pheromone that they can release to let a horned up bed bug know that he's after the wrong mate.
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Anyone else suddenly have the urge to scrub their entire house and maybe call an exterminator just in case?
When the people of Reddit learned this not-so-fun fact, they were understandably disgusted.
Some felt compelled to share their own traumatic experiences with bed bugs - and though they weren't nearly as bad as what a female bed bug has to go through, they were still pretty rough.
For example, one bed bugs survivor wrote: "Had bedbugs in 2010. Horrible experience. You could never know whether they were gone or not.
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"Waking up in the middle of the night scratching yourself for months/years. It broke my brain, and I've been different ever since."
Another claimed that a bed bug infestation was the closest he had come to 'a nervous breakdown'.
Between the general terror of bed bugs and now their violent mating rituals, people have agreed that they're ready for the seedy little insects to go extinct.
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"There's not a lot of creatures I actively want to see go extinct, but bed bugs are one of them. The genuinely seem to bring no benefit to this world," read one comment.
Until that fateful day comes, sleep tight and don't let the bed bugs bite - or perform traumatic insemination.
Ali Condon