Altruism or Rape? Recognizing Our Lenses

Recently, I was sitting at the pond behind our house observing the myriad life around me. The damselflies were mating, flying attached to one another as the one in the rear dropped eggs into the pond. I saw one damselfly struggling underwater, and several others flew to the site of the struggle. As the damselfly crawled out on a stem of grass, another worked hard to free the insect at the same time. As soon as the drowning damselfly cleared the pond, the other attached and together they flew off.

Twenty minutes later I saw this happen again: a struggling damselfly underwater, several coming to the rescue, and success as one attached and they lifted off above the pond.

My immediate thought was that I was witnessing insect altruism, and I knew I wanted to blog about it.

When I got back to the house I told my husband about my observation, and his immediate reaction was that I was just watching “mating.” In fact, he thought it was just as likely that I was witnessing a kind of rape, in which a struggling damselfly underwater was swarmed by others ready to pounce and attach to an insect clearly unable to “say no” in its situation.

Interesting how we each interpret the world through the lens of our own perspectives. We both saw mating, but I understood the scene as altruism; my husband as opportunism. Perhaps it could be a bit of both.

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

Image courtesy of HaPe_Gera via Creative Commons.

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