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Today, 05 November 2009

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Yesterday, 04 November 2009

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Promiscuous females are more likely to give birth to healthier babies than their monogamous sisters, Australian researchers into free love among the country's furry fauna said on Thursday.

Scientists at the Australian National University said they had proven for the first time that frequent sex with multiple partners increased the survival rate of offspring in an animal species.

The team's reproductive revelation comes after two years spent probing the sex life of the brown antechinus, a small mouse-sized carnivorous marsupial found in forests in south eastern Australia, which is related to the Tasmanian Devil.

Team leader Diana Fisher said there were many theories for why some female animals had multiple sex partners — "whether it's trading sex for food and protection, dealing with infertile males or avoiding the negative effects of inbreeding in species that can't recognise their relatives".

However her team is the first to convincingly demonstrate that promiscuity increased the odds of mating with males who had the strongest sperm, she said.

"Paternity tests showed that the sperm of some males were far more successful than others and... that babies fathered by these males were twice as likely to survive."

The researchers compared a group of marsupials whose females who were only allowed to mate with one male and another where they had many partners.

"The result was that survival of babies with promiscuous mothers was almost three times as high as those in the monogamous group," Fisher said.

Despite the advantages to the species from free love, males usually died after a short and intense single mating season due to exhaustion and aggressive encounters with other males.

Females got off lightly, usually living to breed for a second or third year.

The findings will be published in the latest issue of ‘Nature’ magazine.

AFP