hi, this is emily from minuteearth. sometimes, a hamster mom looks at her adorablelittle babies and is like, 'i just want to gobble you up'—except not in a cute way...morein an “i’m actually about to eat you†way. hamster moms are not alone—pigs, bugs, birds,snakes, primates, and fish all occasionally nom on the next generation. which is weird. not just because we humans consider it deeplywrong to eat our own babies, but also because making babies is the primary goal of virtuallyall life, so eating them, and the genes they
carry, seems like the ultimate act of selfdefeat. but self-defeating impulses have a prettystraightforward way of dying out, so the fact that species across the animal kingdom occasionallycannibalize their young suggests that it can sometimes be a successful strategy. for instance, hamsters appear to use baby-eatingas a form of crowd control: females with litters of 8 or 9 pups eat two of them, on average. and when scientists have tried adding a couplepups to the litter, the hamster moms eat four. but removing a few pups the day they’reborn pretty much stops the cannibalism before it starts—suggesting that a hamster momeats her young to keep her litter small enough
that she can provide for the survivors andensure they grow up to pass on their genes. other critters, like the long-tailed sun skink,chow down on their babies only in emergencies. when predators repeatedly threaten to eatthe mother’s eggs, she beats them to it and eats them all herself. which actually makes sense: if the eggs aredoomed to become someone's lunch, making them her lunch helps prepare the mama skink foranother round of reproduction. and sometimes, kids, you know, get in theway, so they just have to go. the male sand goby fertilizes eggs from multiplefemales over a short period of time and cares for them all together in one nest.
in order to mate again, he has to wait forall his eggs to hatch, so he sacrifices the slowpokes to free himself up for more baby-making. in short, for critters across the animal kingdomto maximize the resources, energy and opportunities they need to pass on their genes, sometimesit does make sense to order off of the kid’s menu. this video was sponsored by audible.com, theleading provider of audiobooks, with over 250,000 downloadable titles. annnd, on the topic of eating one’s ownkind, maybe you’ll want to check out audible’s audiobook version of “miracle in the andes,â€the harrowing first-person account of a high-altitude
plane crash in the mountains of peru, andthe 72-day-long struggle for survival that followed. download “miracle in the andes,†or anotherbook of your choice for free, by going to audible.com/minuteearth and signing up fora 30-day trial membership. and thanks for watching!