Hello, I just saw your post on weird animal reproduction and it was super interesting!
But I was wondering about the cottony cushion scale insect -- if the male scale keeps infesting and mating with his female offspring on and on and on, when does it stop? The phrasing gave me the vibe that the male never dies, he just keeps being transferred to different females. Is this a form of immortality? Or does he not really count as being alive, if he's just a lump of tissue?
He's definitely *alive,* since even a single cell counts as alive. From what I understand, the cell line is immortal. This isn't unprecedented-- Tasmanian devils have two contagious cancer cell lines that they spread by biting each other in the face, dogs have one that's an STD, and labs have kept the cervical cancer cells of Henrietta Lacks (HeLa) going for decades for experimentation. The very thing that causes your cells to age is also part of keeping them from becoming cancerous, so cancer is often immortal (until it kills its life support). Basically, it's just a multicellular organism becoming single-celled again.
So yeah, the immortality part isn't unusual. This is just the only case I know of of a cell line like this not only not harming the host, but also reproducing sexually!