WHEN death looms, saving for the future is no longer important: it’s all about the here and now.
It is a mindset that can be summed up by a T-shirt once seen by biologist Ben Sadd of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “It said, ‘I’m dying of cancer – please have sex with me’.”
Now Sadd and colleagues have found that mealworm beetles, Tenebrio molitor, do a similar thing. If their immune systems are so seriously challenged that the beetles may die, they divert their resources into producing sexual pheromones.
Sadd stressed the immune systems of 20 virgin…
