Animals are amazing and there are many things about their lives that we don’t know. In some, they look like us but others can really seem incredible to us. For example, there are fish that eat their mother’s stomach to make a hole to be born through!
Find out which are the rarest cases in the animal world:
1. Mother Octopus
The mother octopus lays up to 200,000 eggs at a time and has to take care of them for 40 days, making air currents to oxygenate them and protect them from predators.
Since it can’t go out to feed during that time, it often eats its own tentacles to keep up with energy.
2. Mother elephants
Female elephants do not raise their babies alone, but, as in all aspects of their lives, they have a strong herd concept. After a pregnancy of almost two years, the cubs, which are also born blind and dependent, are raised by all the females in the community.
Your baby weighs around 90 kilos at birth!
3. Orangutan mother
The orangutan baby is one of those that takes the longest to be able to separate from its mother: until it is 7 years old it is completely dependent, almost like the human baby.
4. Alpine black salamander
If the pregnancy of the mother elephant seems long to you, you will be surprised to know that the gestation of this reptile lasts 3 years and 2 months.
5. Elephant seal
The mother elephant seal eats a lot during pregnancy, and when the baby is born, she feeds it milk so concentrated in fat that the baby gains 4.5 kilograms a day.
During the breastfeeding period, the mother does not eat and loses up to 130 kilos.
6. Sea lice
The sea lice is a fearsome parasite because it threatens many fish such as salmon. But his life is not easy either.
While male sea lice fertilize up to 20 females simultaneously, at the end of gestation the females see how the young begin to eat their bellies from the inside to make their way to the world. After that, they can never reproduce again.
7. Koala Mom
Perhaps you already knew that the koala is a marsupial, that is, it keeps its newborn pups in a bag until they finish developing. They spend 6 months in the bag and another 6 hanging from the mother’s back.
But maybe you didn’t know that because koalas feed on eucalyptus leaves, which are poisonous to other species and to undeveloped baby koalas, they feed their pups with their feces.
8. Rheobatrachus silus
This species of frog, native to Australia, is currently extinct. But their gestation process was very particular: the mothers swallowed their own eggs to protect them from predators in nothing less than their own stomachs. When the young were born, they vomited them up.
9. Daddy Seahorse
Although we are talking about mothers, the male seahorse deserves a place on this list… Because it is the one that carries the young in its womb!
This is how she gives birth to hundreds of babies at the same time.
10. Marmoset Family
Cotton-top tamarins have a very special way of upbringing: each baby is not cared for by its mother, but rather the young, which are born one or two at a time, are cared for by the entire community, including males and females. That’s why it’s important that only one female in the group gets pregnant at a time.