Male antechinuses live through just a single, extremely intense mating season. So to maximize their chances at sex, these little carnivorous marsupials waste as little time on sleep as possible, new research has found.
During a three-week breeding period, males belonging to two species — dusky (Antechinus swainsonii) and agile (A. agilis) antechinus — lost an average of three hours of sleep every night, or around 20% of their total sleep. "This level of sleep loss would make humans perform very poorly," lead author Erika Zaid, a graduate researcher in sleep eco-physiology at La Trobe University in Australia, told Live Science in an email. "Yet, antechinus endured doing so for three weeks."
