{"id":551390,"date":"2026-07-30T14:26:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T14:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/551390\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T14:26:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T14:26:11","slug":"its-the-only-known-example-of-necrophilia-having-an-evolutionary-advantage-to-both-the-male-and-the-unfortunate-female","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/551390\/","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s the only known example of necrophilia having an evolutionary advantage &#8211; to both the male and the unfortunate female\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nature is never a good place to look for moral guidance. Anything goes, as long as it increases the chances of one&#8217;s genes being passed down the generations. Take the male Amazonian frog Rhinella proboscidea &#8211; it doesn&#8217;t even care whether its mates are alive or dead.<\/p>\n<p>Like many amphibians, the species is an explosive breeder. Males gather in huge numbers at spawning sites during the brief, desperate mating season, battling among themselves for access to females.<\/p>\n<p>Some females inevitably perish in the scrum, yet they are still fair game: by mounting a dead partner and then massaging her abdomen with his legs, a male can squeeze out her cargo of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discoverwildlife.com\/animal-facts\/do-eggs-really-need-sperm\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">eggs<\/a> and fertilise them in the usual way.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s the only known example of necrophilia having an evolutionary advantage &#8211; to both the male and the unfortunate female, who would otherwise have missed out on breeding entirely<\/p>\n<p>Discover more fascinating frog facts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nature is never a good place to look for moral guidance. Anything goes, as long as it increases&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":551391,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":["post-551390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551390\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/551391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}