A bug in beetles’ mating skills …

BEETLES widely claimed to show ‘gay’ or ‘bi-sexual’ tendencies are just very bad at mating with the opposite sex, a study has found.

Scientists at the University of East Anglia found that when males were greatly outnumbered by females, the males were much more likely to try to mate with other males.

The researchers suggested that as there was less pressure to find the right mate, the bugs just made more errors.

By contrast, in conditions where females were in short supply, same-sex matings were less frequent. In an experiment, the team bred six populations of red flour beetles and maintained them for 80 to 100 generations.

Kris Sales, a PhD researcher who led the study published in the journal Animal Behaviour, said: ‘In the femalebiased lines …it looks as though males have lost their abilities to discriminate between male and female mates.’