Love is in the Air: Jealous Topi

We’re used to seeing males pursuing ladies they wish to mate with, while females pick and choose who’ll be the father of their offspring. With Topi antelopes, however, the situation is reversed. Ladies will go nuts about dominant guys who manage to secure central position of mating arenas called leks. They’ll fight each other and quite aggressively pursue males they’ve mated with before. If female Topi finds her chosen partner in bed with another, she’ll likely barge in and interrupt the exchange. Meanwhile, males play hard to get and seek out the least mated girls. Eventually, tired of jealous outbursts of their former partners, they’ll launch a counterattack and refuse to rekindle the romance. It seems like aggressive jealousy doesn’t pay in animal world either.