![]() Then the females quickly become fertile again and mate with the very males who killed their cubs.įrom the newcomers' standpoint, "there's no sense in spending energy or resources raising the previous males' cubs," Stanford says, since the new males are most likely unrelated. If other males successfully oust these fathers, the newcomers almost immediately kill any young cubs, particularly those the female lions are nursing-despite every effort on the mothers' part to stop the slaughter. Typically, a pride of lions includes one or two adult males who father the cubs. Male lions are one of the most cited examples of this type of infanticide. "Now, certain scenarios are recognized as part of an animal's reproductive strategy." "Before the 1970s, any type of infanticide in animals was considered pathological," says Craig Stanford, a primatologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In some cases, depending on the circumstances, they still do. "That way there's nothing rotting in her den which might attract predators," Barthel says.Īs reasonable as these decisions sound, there's still something profoundly upsetting about the deed-so much so that even biologists used to regard it as a pathological behavior. This nourishes her and has the added benefit of removing the carcass. And if one of her cubs dies, she'll most likely eat it immediately, as Khali did. "They become a resource, one she can't afford to waste," Barthel says.Ī mother bear-or lion or wild dog-does the same if she can't nurse her cubs or find food for them. ![]() When mammalian mothers give birth, they must begin nursing their infants-something they can do only if they're healthy and well nourished.īut if, for instance, a mother bear in the wild gives birth to unhealthy or deformed cubs, or is unable to find enough to eat, she will typically kill and consume them. Insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and birds also have been implicated in killing, and sometimes devouring, the young of their own kind. Indeed, mother bears, felines, canids, primates, and many species of rodents-from rats to prairie dogs-have all been seen killing and eating their young. They might sound cold to us, but they're simple-and they have to do with resources." "It can seem unnatural," Barthel says, "but there are reasons. A few hours later she was happily nursing from a bottle.Īnd the keepers were left trying to answer what seems the cruelest and most unthinkable of questions: Why would a mother eat her own young? To save the lone cub, the veterinarians immediately treated her with antibiotics and placed her in an incubator to restore her body temperature. Shortly afterward, all the sloth bears fell ill with a flu virus, which may have caused the cubs' illness. "We don't know if this was the case with her other two cubs, but my assumption is they were not well." "She was ill, with an elevated white blood cell count," Barthel says. They rushed the cub to the zoo's veterinary hospital, where she was found to be hypothermic and suffering from an infection. On January 6, they retrieved Khali's last surviving infant-a female-from her den. So they were on hand when Khali ate another of her babies and turned her back on the third.īarthel and the keepers decided they had to intervene. The keepers continued to monitor her and her cubs, as they do with all bear mothers. (She was an experienced mom, having raised two other cubs at a different zoo in 2004.) Khali gave birth to two more cubs that day, and for the next week, she was as attentive, calm, and nurturing as a mother sloth bear could be. "Our assumption is that the cub was not well, and it died," Barthel says. Then, 20 minutes later, Khali-still in labor with other cubs-bent down, not to lick her newborn, but to eat it. They cheered when they saw the palm-size cub come into the world. He and the bears' keepers were watching Khali on a closed-circuit television. "We don't really know what happened," says Tony Barthel, a mammal curator in the zoo's Asia Trail section. But soon after Khali delivered her first cub, something went wrong. ![]() When Khali, a sloth bear at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C., went into labor in late December last year, her keepers were thrilled.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |