Plenty of us human moms feel under-appreciated from time to time. Perhaps, hypothetically speaking, by teens who ask whether the dishwasher's dirty or clean without checking, who fail to turn their laundry the right way out or who think "what's for supper" is acceptable slang for "hello." But however put-upon we may feel, our kids' failure to overtly and regularly praise us for our maternal virtues is nothing beside the societal lack of appreciation for some of the animal kingdom's great mothers. These are moms maligned purely because they are, well, a little creepy. A little crawly, even.
Luckily, our judgment doesn't matter in the least. For their respective babies, naked mole rats, vultures, centipedes and aye-ayes are as beautiful as any mom is, really, in the eyes of her child.
Modern Western culture caricatures vultures as undertakers, grim harbingers of death and hardly ideal images of maternal love. But in Ancient Egypt, vultures, recognized as caring parents to their offspring, were identified with motherhood. A vulture is used as the hieroglyph for mother, mut being the word for them both, and for the mother goddess of Thebes.
Vulture expert Corinne Kendall, curator of Conservation and Research at the North Carolina Zoo, told Salon that vultures make great parents. There's a bit of a lack of observational studies of vultures — plus, males and females of species like the white-backed vulture are indistinguishable from each other (perhaps why the Ancient Egyptians thought all vultures were female.) So scientists aren't sure exactly how mom and dad divide the labor of parenting. But they think that in general, vultures are pretty egalitarian parents. That's something every mom can appreciate.
"Vultures definitely are really good parents. They don't reproduce until ... they're four or five years old, depending on the species, which is pretty late for birds. And so they're definitely very invested when they finally reproduce," Kendall told Salon in a video interview. White-backed vultures, a species of Old World vulture Kendall studies in Tanzania, only lay one egg per year, max — which again means that there's a lot of parental investment in that egg, resulting in a high survival rate for the spoiled only child they produce. Mom and dad vulture work together to keep that little chick alive, teaching it how to do vulture things, and even checking in on it once it reaches independence (like humans doing the odd load of laundry for our young adults.)
Mom and dad vulture work together to keep that little chick alive, teaching it how to do vulture things, and even checking in on it once it reaches independence.
"We do generally think that both males and females take care of incubating the egg, and they also take care of feeding the chick." Depending on the species of vulture we're talking about, incubation ranges from 50 days to almost two months. "Then they're spending another three to four months taking care of the chick at the nest before it leaves. And then once the bird reaches the point of fledgling, the vultures will continue to check in on the chick and provide some additional feeding as the chick starts to learn the landscape and kind of figure out how to get off on its own."
Interestingly, Old World vultures and the New World vultures we have in North America (condors, turkey vultures, and black vultures) are from quite different branches of the raptor family tree. This makes them striking examples of convergent evolution, where two evolutionarily distinct groups evolve similar characteristics due to similar environments and occupying similar niches. There are differences, though. Old World vultures scavenge more than their American sisters, and white-backed vultures is even considered an obligate scavenger, lacking the ability to kill its prey.
"These white-backs are kind of your prototypical vulture. They're not very attractive, they're brown, and they have a long neck, and they feed in large groups, and during their social feeding, they're eating a lot of soft tissue out of the carcass," Kendall said. Well, not attractive to us, maybe. But their babies love them. Feeding in groups, the vultures are able to protect each other and box out other species, and watch each other to determine where food sources might be. And then they bring those food sources back home for dinner.
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As Kendall described, they use their serrated tongues, with little ridges on the sides, to rapidly slurp — yes, she did use the word "slurp" — soft tissue from carcasses they spot from high above the grassland savannah using their extremely keen eyesight, transporting it in their crop, a special sack on the neck that's separate from the extremely acidic digestive system, so that they can lovingly regurgitate up to around 500 grams of meat into the mouth of their hungry chick. By contrast, a New World vulture like the turkey vulture relies more on a truly amazing sense of smell to identify live prey in forests.
The closest relative of the New World vultures, Kendall said, is actually that emblem of motherhood, the stork. Incidentally, some stork species have been known to sacrifice their chicks in order to ensure the survival of the others. As morbid as that seems, that's nature for you. Still, maybe it's time to update greeting cards with vultures to portray a less brutal version of motherhood.
A face only a child could love
Other "ugly" moms are just as decent. Naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber) are more closely related to chinchillas and porcupines than to either moles or rats. They lack the adorable charisma of chinchillas, porcupines, moles or rats, though. And they lack fur to cover their wrinkly pinkish-grey skin. And their breasts are often asymmetrical (not, like, different cup sizes as is totally normal in human moms — naked mole rat moms often have odd numbers of mammary glands, such as 11 or 13.) And they have tiny, mostly useless little eyes, no ears, and a pair of huge incisors like a mastodon's tusks. Your momma.
A naked mole rat is seen in a display enclosure of a new building for small mammals, birds, carnivorous plants and insectivorous animals at the zoological-botanical garden in Stuttgart. (Photo by Marijan Murat/picture alliance via Getty Images)Indeed, these moms are yummy mummies only to the one to three males, or soldiers, with whom the single female, or queen, enjoys a long-term relationship while being cared for by a host of sterile workers, a family set-up that makes her unheard-of fertility, for a mammal, seem less daunting. The queen remains fertile throughout her long life, producing between three and nearly thirty pups in a single litter starting at one year of age — and living, and breeding, for another 29 years.
Dr. Miguel Brieño-Enríquez, a researcher and assistant professor in obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the Magee-Womens Research Institute in Pittsburgh, discovered that in naked mole rats — unlike in human or mouse females — the production of egg cells from germ cells takes place after the naked mole rat is born, giving the girl mole rat a very large reserve of eggs for her small size, and allowing for the continued production of egg cells for a still-unknown length of time.
The sociable, or eusocial, nature of naked mole rat communities means they're basically all siblings or cousins. They work together to defend each other, to share food, and to take care of the queen. Other than the odd fight-to-the-death among females to become the queen, these are famously cooperative creatures. These babies even share the mighty boob: breaking a "rule" of mammal biology, naked mole rats do not have just around half as many babies as they have mammary glands. They don't need to: the pups will happily take turns being nursed from the same mammary gland, and this devoted and well-cared-for mother spends plenty of time with each of her many, many beloved children.
Mom will nurse her pups for about a month, after which time they are packed off to a specific tunnel that serves as a nursery, where worker mole rats feed them till they're ready to feed themselves.
"Like in humans, there are good moms and other ones, let’s say with less skills. However, like in humans, the colony/family is there to help," Brieño-Enríquez wrote in an email to Salon. As it's been said, it takes a village.
I love you and you and you and you and you and you and you
The mamma centipede may have a face like a David Cronenberg nightmare, but she's a devoted parent, curling around the wriggly bits of multi-legged spaghetti she calls her offspring to protect them. And she is patient as she rears them. A study of a soil centipede (Geophilus serbicus) from the Balkan peninsula recently identified 15 different stages in the early lifecycle of the young creepy-crawlies, all of which, the authors note, are "obligatorily dependent on prolonged maternal care." It's not just Balkan centipedes who are good moms. Just over 25 years ago in Brazil, in the first field report of maternal care in neotropical centipedes, author G. Machado noted that not all centipede species exhibit parental care, and this behavior can't be studied in the laboratory, because the female is very sensitive to disturbances, abandoning her brood if attacked by fungi or predators.
Not an auspicious beginning to his study, but in fact, the entomologist found that in the neotropical species they studied in Brazil, "the female curls herself around the eggs or the young, laying on her side and enclosing the brood between her legs and the ventral surface of her body. As recorded for other centipede species, the eggs and the young are thus safeguarded from contact with the soil." True, he did note that in the event of disturbance, mama centipede may abandon her eggs or young. She might also eat them. Let she who has never wished to eat her offspring cast the first stone.
Assuming they're out of the egg and don't get abandoned, to themselves escape or bury themselves in sand, the observed centipedelings (technically called nymphs) enjoy loving maternal care. The mom may move them to a better location, and she grooms the little cuties, just as she groomed them when they were mere babes-in-eggs. In certain groups of centipedes, Machado writes, "this apparently increases offspring survival, because without the mother the eggs and nymphs always die from fungal attack or unknown reasons."
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Machado notes that in arthropods, a group that includes the centipede, maternal care is associated with rough conditions. Arthropods ranging from earwigs to some beetles to crickets or spiders living in the soil face particular challenges due to nasty fungal infections and a high risk of predators lurking in leaf litter. This means that the survival of the species depends on the evolution of maternal care to protect eggs and nymphs from these dangers, and this may well be the reason for such devoted, if occasionally cannibalistic, mother love among certain centipedes as well.
Beauty's in the aye aye of the beholder
Honestly, despite this strong slate of contestants, the aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis) has got to win the Ugly Mom award. This mom from Madagascar is a scrawny lemur that comes out at night, has long clawed fingers and toes, a pseudo thumb, a narrow, bat-like face (with moderately boopable nose) and Yoda-like ears, a bushy tail, a round skull and oddly shaped jaw, and eyes with a persistent cross-eyed or wild-eyed appearance.
Those fingers come with a long, skeletal middle digit equipped with a ball-and-socket joint for horrifying dexterity, like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come beckoning Ebenezer Scrooge to gaze upon his own sordid death. She uses it to tap fatefully on trees and listen for the tiny movements of tasty grubs within, which she then extracts using those same Nosferatu phalanges. Her sparse, wiry-looking fur sticks out in all directions as if she'd stuck that bony middle finger in an electric socket. She also has a pair of long, constantly growing incisors strong enough to chew through cinder blocks as well as tree bark. The aye-aye is endangered, its habitat fragmented and individuals, though rarely seen, sometimes killed because they are seen as bad luck.
But the aye-aye is also an excellent mother. She and her brood live high up in the trees, jumping from branch to branch and occasionally making exploratory sallies on the ground. She makes great round nests of leaves and teaches her offspring to eat wood-boring insect larvae and fruit, using those rodent-like incisors to break through hard skins or rinds to the sweet flesh inside. Like many primates, the aye-aye uses play to teach her babies everything they'll need to know to become independent.
She will also use that mobile, 3-inch-long middle finger to reach right into her nasal cavity almost all the way to the back of her throat. She does this in order to pick her nose, before licking the mucus, as scientists confirmed by observation followed by CAT scan to determine that the chopstick-like digit reaches all the way to the pharynx.
Surely, though, mama aye-aye teaches her infants that it's rude to pick their noses, and NEVER to eat the snot. Do as I say, not as I do.
Mama aye-aye has her little quirks and foibles. But like all ugly moms, she's the apple of her baby aye-aye's eye.
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