He began his career investigating Antechinus, a group of small, mouse-like marsupials that exhibit the strange phenomenon of semelparity. Soon after mating, males die. But after years studying the bizarre mammals, he says, he realized that he “was not having nearly as much fun tramping through leech-infested rainforest as one of [his] graduate students was having teasing apart the intricate sex lives of superb fairy-wrens in the croissant-infested Botanic Gardens in Canberra.”
