Many insects spend the majority of their lives in the immature stages of development.
During this brief window, the insect mates and lays her eggs. Reproductive life can be defined in several ways due to the enormous variety of insect reproductive strategies. In this paper, reproductive life is defined as the time from final molt until death in the stage where mating and egg laying occur, under natural conditions. Using this definition, I searched for the insect with the shortest reproductive life. Methods A computer search of Biological Abstracts was employed to initially search for candidate insects in the primary literature.