Male mice age faster and/or die earlier when smelling female mice

This is unfair! Is this one more reason why male monks live long? 😊

"... In a new study, researchers report that the smell of a female mouse can speed up a male mouse’s reproductive aging and even reduce his lifespan. When male animals spent their adulthood sniffing bedding previously used by females, they produced fewer litters in their old age, even if they had mated and sired offspring earlier in life. ...

Fruit flies also experience this type of accelerated aging from female scents but can alleviate the effects by mating. Not so for the rodents: Although male mice that mated tended to live longer than those that didn’t, those that were exposed to an additional female’s smell during mating were more likely to die early. ..."

From the abstract:

"Theories of ageing predict that investment in reproduction will trade-off against survival and later-life reproduction. Recent evidence from invertebrates suggests that just perceiving cues of a potential mate's presence can reduce lifespan, particularly in males, and that activation of neuroendocrine reward pathways associated with mating can alleviate these effects. Whether similar effects occur in vertebrates remains untested. We tested whether exposure to olfactory cues from the opposite sex would influence mortality and reproductive senescence in male mice. We observed that males exposed to female olfactory cues from middle- to old age (from 10 to 24 months of age) showed reduced late-life fertility, irrespective of whether they had also been allowed to mate with females earlier in life. Males that were exposed to female odours in conjunction with mating also showed an increased mortality rate across the exposure period, indicating that olfactory cues from females can increase male mortality in some environments. Our results show that exposure to female odours can influence reproductive ageing and mortality in male mice, highlighting that sensory perception of mates may be an important driver of life-history trade-offs in mammals."

Science

Exposure to female olfactory cues hastens reproductive ageing and increases mortality when mating in male mice (open access)