Dragonfly-ing could be the new ghosting.

Female moorland hawker dragonflies act dead when a pursing male can’t take the hint, according to new research.

The phenomenon was observed by Rassim Khelifa, an entomologist who’s been studying dragonflies for a decade, while he was collecting dragonfly larvae in the Swiss Alps. His findings were published in the Ecology, the journal of the Ecological Society of America.

Khelifa watched a female dragonfly dive straight into the ground, where she lay motionless until the male that had been chasing her flew away.

“I expected that the female could be unconscious or even dead after her crash landing, but she surprised me by flying away quickly as I approached,” Khelifa writes in the report.

He went on to observe 35 female moorland hawkers and watched 31 similarly crash into the ground while being pursued. Twenty-seven successfully got rid of their unwanted suitors.

It’s noteworthy that dragonfly sex isn’t that pleasant. Males often approach the females from behind and aggressively mount them in mid-air. Male moorland hawkers are also particularly brutal: while most species of male dragonflies stick around after copulation to help protect the fertilized eggs, moorland hawkers immediately fly away. They also have the ability to yank out a prior male’s sperm. If a female has already laid eggs, this move can damage her reproductive tract.

Khelifa plans to expand his research to find out if this tactic is specific to moorland hawkers, or if all female dragonflies know how to play dead to get out of coupling.