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.
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.
