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Moms – we ’ve all got them , and we all need them . But some animals have a slightly different idea of what it means to be a good mother . From moms who turn their bodies into food for thought to others who encourage their youthful to become cannibals , here are the uncanny mothering techniques in nature .

Chickens

Poison arrow frog.

Poison arrow frog.

crybaby moms take their duties very gravely . make an endless amount of Ca carbonate for eggshells is a hard task , so if chicken do n’t get enough Ca in their diets , they ’ll actually dissolve their own off-white to make babe - housing shells . That ’s one mode to lose baby weighting !

Cuckoos

Cuckoos have figured out a unique way to get the neighbor to do the difficult work of raising youthful . Momma cuckoos will sneakily lay their eggs in another hoot ’s nest . In doing so , the bozo trick the other bird – often a different , smaller metal money – into take on on the expensive burden of raising the chick . The cuckoo doll usually hatches first , and grows quicker , storm the other chicks out of the nest , where they then pall . It then vex the full aid of its adoptive parents , devote it much keen chances of survival .

Chickens

Chickens

Blood - wet-nurse Ants

The flyspeck endangered Madagascar - basedAdetomyrmaant has a strange way to show love to its kiddos . The pismire practice something sleep with as " non - destructive cannibalism . " When the settlement ’s queen afford birth to ant larvae , she and her workers jaw muddle in the petite baby to feed on their haemolymph – their circulative organisation fluid ( which would be lineage in mammalian ) . Scientists ca n’t say precisely why these ant do this – ants have a social behavior of transferring fluids to each other , so they may be drill a rudimentary bod of that demeanour . The baby ants do n’t exit , but sucking rip from the unseasoned is a eldritch room to show vampire affection .

Gray Whales

Cuckoo

Cuckoo

Sometimes , mother in the wild have to go to great length to protect their young .

Pacific grey whale transmigrate thousands of Admiralty mile from cold , plankton - rich Arctic water to relatively nutrient - poor tropic lagoons off of the coast of Mexico where they give parentage . While the journey claim the gray-headed whales aside from a openhanded food supply , the southerly neighborhood is free of the life-threatening killer whale ( they stick to colder body of water ) that otherwise hunt the newborn whale . It also give their newborns time to feed on their mother ' unbelievably productive milk ( 53 percentage fat ! ) and work up a layer of insulating fat before the must head to the icy Arctic . Like bears , the female parent whales go thirsty for months while still demand to produce gamy - calorie Milk River for their babies . During this time they may misplace as much as 8 heaps of weighting .

Spiders

The blood-sucking Madagascar-based Adetomyrma ant.

The blood-sucking Madagascar-based Adetomyrma ant.

For many spider , the enactment of mating signal that their life sentence are about to end – recollect   Charlotte ’s Web ? For several species of theStegodyphusspiders , motherly dearest goes even further than watching over the nest . female attach their egg cocoon to their webs and watch over over them until the babies think up . Once her children have hatched , the mother continues to eat , but vomit most of her meal as a alimental soup for her young while the spiderlings stay in their mother ’s web .

When the babies are around a month old , the mother wanderer rolls over on her back let the spiderlings to shin over her , kill her by injecting their venom and digestive enzyme into her eubstance , and eat her . After the untried gobble her up , they turn on each other and cannibalize as many of their siblings as they can before leaving their mother ’s vane . Thanksgiving dinner party are believably pretty clumsy after that kind of fostering .

Sea Louse

Gray whale breaching.

Gray whale breaching.

Talk about a dreadful pregnancy . The small Pisces - clinging distaff sea louse has to deal with males that impregnate up to 25 females at one time . The bad part ? By the time she is ready to give nascency to C of babe biting louse , she sit back and the baby chew through her insides to emerge into the world .

Poison Frog

The teensy female poison arrow salientian literally sound above and beyond when taking on the duties of motherhood . After laying as many as five nut and watching them hatch , the strawberry poison arrow frog carries her tadpoles , one by one , on her back , from the rainwater forest floor up into tree as high as 100 foot . After hoisting her babes to the crown , the frog then finds case-by-case pools of water in leave of absence for each tadpole , setting up safe and individualized greenhouse . That ’s not the end of her super - mom duty . The mother strawberry poison pointer toad then feeds each of her young with her own unfertilised eggs over the course of six to eight workweek , thus allowing these tadpoles to acquire into untried frogs without hold to eat each other . What , eggs again ?

Stegodyphus spiders are social, living in nests of hundreds of spiders..

Stegodyphus spiders are social, living in nests of hundreds of spiders..

This tale was allow for byLife ’s Little Mysteries , a sister site to LiveScience .

Sea louse.

Sea louse.

a capuchin monkey with a newborn howler monkey clinging to its back

A photograph of a labyrinth spider in its tunnel-shaped web.

Close-up of an ants head.

A caterpillar covered in parasitic wasp cocoons.

a small pilot whale swims behind a killer whale

an echidna walking towards camera

A photograph of two of Colossal�s genetically engineered wolves as pups.

Beautiful white cat with blue sapphire eyes on a black background.

two white wolves on a snowy background

a puffin flies by the coast with its beak full of fish

Two extinct sea animals fighting

Man stands holding a massive rat.

An image comparing the relative sizes of our solar system�s known dwarf planets, including the newly discovered 2017 OF201

an illustration showing a large disk of material around a star

a person holds a GLP-1 injector

A man with light skin and dark hair and beard leans back in a wooden boat, rowing with oars into the sea

an MRI scan of a brain

Pelican eel (Eurypharynx) head.