Australian Antechinus

The antechinus is a small Australian marsupial that looks like a mouse but reproduces like a salmon. Males spend their entire first year growing, then enter a 2-3 week breeding frenzy so intense it kills them. Testosterone floods their bodies, suppressing immune function. They mate continuously - sessions lasting 12-14 hours - while cortisol levels spike to lethal concentrations. By the end of breeding season, every male is dead. Fur falls out, internal bleeding occurs, gangrene sets in. They've converted their bodies into reproductive effort and the effort consumes them.

Females survive to raise young, and some breed a second year, but males are strictly semelparous. This makes antechinus the only mammal with obligate male semelparity. The strategy evolved because the breeding season coincides precisely with peak insect abundance. Females giving birth when food peaks can provision larger litters. Males that survived breeding would compete with their own offspring for limited resources. Better to die and become nutrients than to burden the next generation.

The business parallel is stark: some roles are inherently semelparous. Founding CEOs often burn out after IPO. First-generation immigrant entrepreneurs exhaust themselves building businesses they pass to children. The intensity required to establish something new may be incompatible with maintaining it long-term. Antechinus males teach that optimal strategy sometimes means giving everything to one explosive effort, then gracefully exiting before becoming a burden on what you created.