Lucky Dust Mites

Want longer lasting sex? Come back as a dust mite.

In virtually every bed tonight, couples will launch themselves into 24-hour sex marathons.

The sexual athletes are dust mites, no more than half a millimetre long. "You can't see them and you can't feel them," said Matt Colloff, a CSIRO Entomology scientist who has spent 25 years studying them. But "almost every house has them."

And, he added, "their sexual behaviour is absolutely bizarre. They mate back-to-back. The male has a penis shaped liked an old-fashioned coffee-pot spout and locks onto the female with a pair of suckers." Because the dust mite's penis is so narrow, compared with its sperm, "the sperm has to travel in single file".

As a result, mating is slow. "They remain in that position for 24 hours," said Dr Colloff. "She continues on with everyday life and the little male hangs on."

Two totally random thoughts arrive out of this information; (1) Am I jealous of their prowess?, and (2) What drives a man to study the sex life of dust mites for a quarter of a century?