You might think that being pursued by amorous females would please a male antelope no end. Not so, according to a paper published this week. Some males even resort to physical violence to repulse the advances of their would-be-mates.

“A general tenet of sexual conflict theory is that males have higher optimum mating rates than do females and therefore should be more persistent when it comes to mating,” writes Jakob Bro-Jørgensen, of the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, in Current Biology (abstract). “However, in promiscuous species, females might benefit from high mating rates as a result of increased conception probability with favoured males, whereas favoured males benefit from mating selectively because of sperm depletion.”

He found that in-demand males tried to balance their ‘mating investment’ equally between females. If they were pursued aggressively by females they thought they had mated enough with in the past they would counterattack to avoid having to mate. “I was interested to see that in cases where the male antelope was free to choose between females, he deliberately went for the most novel mate, rather than the most high-ranking,” notes Bro-Jørgensen (press release).

Sex and wildlife in one story? The world’s press was always going to respond…

AFP has a graphic description of this pursuit: “”Typically, the female will lower her horns and run at the male. Often the male will jump out of the way but occasionally she’ll clip him and sometimes the male will get angry and turn on her. It doesn’t happen that he immediately turns around and mates with her, but it makes it more difficult for him to mate (with others) and more likely that he’ll say ‘oh what the hell’ and mate with her.”

Sex-Crazed Female Antelopes Attack Tired Males, says Fox News.

Not tonight deer . . . No sex for topi antelope, puns the Daily Telegraph

The bounder who has to say no to sex-pest females, was the Time’s first go.

Clearly not happy with that headline, they tried again:

With so many females, what’s a young buck to do?

Image: Topi, Masai Mara National Reserve. Whit Welles 2007, via Wikipedia