Bad mothering common in nature

[primroselane]

I learned the following from a New York Times article:

If a farmer's child pokes around in a rabbit's nest, the mother rabbit may respond by methodically consuming every one of her eight baby bunnies.

A mother guinea hen may start the morning with a dozen chicks, but she walks so fast that they cannot keep up. She may only have two at the end of the day.

Pandas frequently give birth to twins, but they virtually never raise two babies. They have two and throw one away.

The African black eagle feeds only one of her two eaglets, then stands by looking bored as the fattened bird repeatedly pecks its starving sibling to death. The same thing happens with pelicans, egrets and cranes.

Among the storied royal penguins, a mother lays two eggs each breeding season, the second 60 percent larger than the first. Just before the second egg is laid, the mother unsentimentally rolls the first egg right out of the nest.

In Magellanic penguins, the mother also lays two eggs and allows both to hatch; only then does she begin to discriminate. Of the fish she brings to the nest, she gives 90 percent to the larger chick, even as the smaller one howls for food. In the pitiless cold of Antarctica, the underfed bird invariably dies.

Lions, mice and monkeys, females will either spontaneously abort their fetuses or abandon their newborns when times prove rocky or a new male swaggers into town.

[dcross]

Heck, check out what hyena pups do at birth! Then there's the sharks that consume their siblings in the womb! There's a reason nature is called a mother...

[chamoisee]

I think that there are good reasons for almost all of those examples. You may not like to hear about Darwin or natural selection, but that's what it's all about....heartless as that sounds.

[flannelberry]

And where are the dads in all of this...?

[Mountaineer]

Keeps the population genetically superior, the weakest is generally the one that suffers.
What about a rooster with all his hens? Seems to me 50% of chicks are roos. The stongest roo is the one who passes the genes. The others get their butts kicked and little else.

[MaineFarmMom]

Survival of the fittest.

It is not bad mothering.

Quite the opposite.

These species have learned in a hard, harsh school what is necessary for species survival. Those species that could not learn these lessons are now extinct or are headed that way.

It only appears to be bad mothering because we see it as inefficient, yet our entire system of agriculture is built around the idea that we can improve on nature's method thus have changed the very conditions that determines what is "fittest."

Let Man disappear today and within a few decades every domestic animal species that we presently maintain will disappear but for those that are still pretty close to what their original wild ancestors used to be.

.....Alan.

[Goldwave]

Sometimes you hear of the strange stories though, like an animal of one species taking on mothering a baby of another species. This doesn't just happen with domesticated animals. Over the years I've realized that animals are just as varied in personality types and intelligence etc. as humans. Some are very true to the general nature of their species; and others display quite unusual or amazing qualities.