Remember that Bill Withers song?
I want to spread the news that if it feels this good getting used
Oh you just keep on using me until you use me up
That’s pretty much the way it is for the vast majority of male species in the animal kingdom—with the possible exception of it feeling good. As author Daphne Fairbairn notes in the Wall Street Journal (content restricted), “Though most bird fathers help care for their offspring, absentee dads are the rule in 90 percent of mammal species. Fatherly care is even less common in other animal groups.” The females are also larger and sometimes they kill their mates after copulation, as we all know with the black widow. But she also mentions the common yellow garden spider: “If [the males] do succeed in finding a female and mating with her, they invariably die in the process. Their copulatory organs are single-use devices and almost always break off in the female’s reproductive tract, where their lifeless bodies are left to hang.”
What a way to go.