Business Standard

This male will die but won't stop having sex!

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IANS Sydney

Here is an animal that won't get tired of making love until he dies.

Here, sex sessions can last for up to 14 hours at a time - with both males and females romping from mate to mate for weeks!

The black-tailed furry antechinus - found in far southeast Queensland and northeast New South Wales - have a voracious sexual appetite that ends in death, discovered Australian scientists.

According to biologist Diana Fisher from University of Queensland, the animals were over-doing it to promote their own genes over their competitors.

"They try so hard to reproduce that their bodies shut down. The huge rush of stress hormones which helps males in mating period of a few weeks also causes their body tissues to 'disintegrate'," explained Fisher.

 

"There's no courtship. The males would just grab the females and both would mate promiscuously," Andrew Baker, from Queensland University of Technology was quoted as saying.

Females have the ability to block the production of the hormone, said the study was published in the journal Zootaxa.

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First Published: Feb 21 2014 | 5:38 PM IST

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