Australian mouse stops sleeping due to sex addiction
At first glance, the Antechinus (Antechinus) or toothed marsupial mouse, does not seem like a great seducer.. It barely reaches 20 centimeters, has black eyes, a pointed nose and ears, and a tail that is close to the size of its body.. Their hair is usually grayish, cream, cinnamon or copper. And he is based between Australia and Tasmania, where scientists have just discovered that, by having more sex, he stops sleeping.
“All animals need sleep. When humans or animals do not get enough sleep, it can lead to attention problems, irritability, and other harmful effects.. However, this small marsupial is capable of sacrificing hours of sleep to have more sexual relations during the mating season,” concludes a study just published in the journal Current Biology.
The animal kingdom is plagued by extreme sexual practices. From the 30-minute orgasms of the pig to the 50 daily intercourses of the lion, passing through the explosion of the sexual organs of the drones, which ends their lives. Now, the Australian marsupial mouse slips through the front door into the history of reproductive biology by staging a three-week orgy with 14-hour days passing from female to female.
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The multi-year Current Biology study is the first to demonstrate direct evidence of sleep restriction in a land mammal, driven by a strong sexual desire, to a level that would qualify as addiction or intoxication.
“We showed that males stop being sleepy during the breeding season, and that they sleep half as much,” explains researcher Erika Zaid, a zoologist at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.. “In humans and other animals, restricting the normal amount of sleep leads to worse performance while we are awake, and the effect worsens day after day. However, the antechinus did just that: they slept three hours less each night for three weeks.”
This type of extreme sexual practice means that the life expectancy of males is only one year, and they carry it out only once in their short life.. In fact, having sex is the last thing they do.
In addition to giving up sleep, the animal also gives up food, despite needing to eat 60% of its weight every day.. This, together with sexual stress, and the fact that they have to physically compete with other males for access to as many females as possible to maximize their reproductive success, causes their immune system to collapse, be invaded by blood and intestinal parasites, suffer infections, and die. before the pups are born.
Females, however, live for two years.. Something that has been proven that a male can also achieve if he is separated from the females just before the mating season; Which, if they were rational animals, would open a debate between a long monastic life, or a very short but sexually hyperactive one.
Their unusual history is what attracted researchers led by zoology professor John Lesku, also from La Trobe University, to study them: “We first discovered that male dusky antechinas, but not females, became restless during their only season Of reproduction”. They then used accelerometry to track their movements, and electrophysiology and metabolic measures to quantify exactly how much sleep they missed.
The findings suggest that antechinus may have some mechanism to stay active with less sleep during this period.. Another possibility is that they accept all the disadvantages and harms of staying awake to improve their chances of having sex, the study reflects.
“It's actually a little surprising that these animals don't sacrifice even more sleep during the breeding season, since they will die soon anyway,” says Zaid.. In fact, the fact that they still decide to get some sleep “reveals the essential functions that sleep performs,” he points out.
Researchers do not believe that the main reason for the lowering of defenses that leads to death is this lack of sleep.. Partly because the males who saw less sleep were not exactly the ones with the worst conditions.. Researchers now want to learn more about how antechinus are able to manage this sleep loss from a biological point of view, and without losing their capabilities.