🦋 Female dragonflies who don't wish to mate will fake their death, falling from the sky and lying on the ground frozen until the unwanted male leaves them alone, a study from the University of Zurich in 2019 found. ⁠ ⁠ The behavior was noted in the Swiss Alps, where male dragonflies outnumber females. In 86 percent of cases, females would crash to the ground when males approached them. Those who kept flying “were all intercepted by a male.” “Of the 27 motionless females, 21 (77.7 percent) were successful in deceiving the coercive male,” University of Zurich researcher Rassim Khelifa said. Even though it is a risky strategy, faking death appears to help females survive longer and produce more offspring by avoiding coercion.⁠ ⁠ Khelifa further noticed that when males are not present, females lay eggs in more open spaces, leading him to reason that they lay eggs in dense vegetation to avoid male attention. ⁠ The strategy is not unique--robber flies fake their deaths, so do the mantis and...