Five Minutes to Live: The Story of the Female Dolania Americana

What would you do if you only had five minutes to live?

For many, the idea of having 24 hours left to live can already present a difficult metaphysical quandary; to reduce the timespan to five minutes at a moment’s notice can seem, from a human perspective, almost inconceivable.

But what if we further shortened the timespan to imagine an entire adult life lasting only five minutes? The premise may seem preposterous, yet that is the reality for one genuinely unfortunate creature⎯the female dolania americana, otherwise known as the American sand-burrowing mayfly.

Life begins quite normally for this insect, if hatching in the sandy riverbed of a stream or river can be considered normal. In this stage of their lifecycle, the mayflies are known as nymphs, and they generally spend up to two years in this form. Unlike most other mayflies, they are predatory, feasting on sand-dwelling critters like midge larvae, nematodes, and tardigrades. However, for a dolania americana nymph, even this stage of its life can present a constant struggle for survival from ravenous predators, despite its possessing hindlegs with a notably defensive design.

Believe it or not, this stage of a female dolania americana’s life is Shangri-La compared to the grueling race just ahead of her.

When the time comes for the female to molt, she will make a remarkable change from an unimpressive, cylindrical nymph to the comparatively magnificent subimago, a preadult stage unique to mayflies. Among the most prominent changes are the newly developed forewings and hindwings, a set of appendages that will aid the female in her feverish quest to find a mate. Another shocking change is the absence of functioning mouthparts, which is fitting, as it is a part of her that she will never need to use again.

In this state, although resembling an adult, she will not have progressed to the fully-adult imago state. Tragically, the female dolania americana will never reach that stage. From the moment she molts to the moment her wings beat for the last time, the clock is ticking, and at most, she will only have 300 seconds to live.

During those same moments, countless swarms of males will have molted into their final adult form as imagos. Within the first five minutes of entering into this new state, male dolania americanas will emerge from the water along with the females with one key, instinctual objective⎯to swarm frenetically over the surface of the water in the hopes of finding a mate before they die.

For a female, this usually involves a more passive role, where she must rely on the coordination and efforts of the more developed imago male to find her. With the seconds of her life winding down, a female’s search for a male to mate with are further complicated by the grotesque beasts that await her at the river's edge, hovering in the air above the water, and lurking just below the surface. A variety of fish, whirligig beetles, sparrows, bats, dragonflies, and spiders will form an assault that most females are ill-suited to survive.

For the female, a successful union and mating session with a male in the midst of the chaos surrounding her will prove to be the mark of a life well-lived. Almost immediately following mating, the female will begin to produce eggs. She can generate up to 60 eggs before she dies, at which point her lifeless body will drop to the water’s surface and sink to the bottom of the riverbed from where she arose. Her new eggs, which by this point will have also sunk to the sandy riverbed, will (if they are not eaten) take a year to hatch, at which point the circle of life will once again begin anew.

Although the male will live up to six times longer than the female, a regular Methuselah of the species, thirty minutes of flying time is usually all the male can muster before succumbing to fatigue and drowning in the river below.

For a female dolania americana, who boasts the wretched feat of having the shortest adult lifespan of any recorded organism, five minutes is all that is needed to achieve her life’s work. With so little time to live, does her strength lie in her single-minded objective? Does it lie in her ability to accomplish so much with so little?

What would you do if you only had five minutes to live?