You’ve heard of a feeding frenzy. Check out the breeding frenzy. A “bugnado”— seriously, a tornado-like swirling column of insects, was captured on video above a cornfield in Iowa by professional storm chaser and photographer Mike Hollingsworth on July 4, says Yahoo news. They don’t happen very often and conditions have to be just right, but the result is an eerie, sci-fi film sight as clouds of bugs swoop and sway in the air en masse, looking sometimes like a plume of smoke or a jet of water (there’s video on the link) or even a forming funnel cloud. And what could make them behave this way?

Sex, of course.

“This is a mating flight,” says Joe Kiper, entomologist and executive director of the Virginia Museum of Natural History, who spoke with Live Science about the phenomenon. The bugs are usually mayflies or midges, and this soaring flight is the last thing they’ll ever do. It’s a giant mating ground for males to impress females who seek a mate. Once the mission is accomplished the males will die, the females will lay eggs and then they, too, will die.

But then, a giant sex party doesn’t seem like a bad way to go.