The 5 Most Horrifyingly Bad Mothers in the Animal Kingdom

Male horses don't like competition, so when they come across a foal that isn't theirs, they have a tendency to kick it to death (think about that the next time you see a bunch of horse posters in a little girl's bedroom). But they won't do it to their own kid. So mom's goal is to make it so that none of the males in the herd know for sure the kid isn't theirs ... by having sex with every single one of them.

GettyIn other words, being slutty saves lives.

So mamma's giving it up like a back alley hooker to protect her precious child. Is there any story more inspiring than a mother willing to sacrifice everything, even her dignity, for the safety of her offspring? But then, of course, if she's not allowed to screw every swinging dick in the pasture, she'll just go ahead and abort the pregnancy.

Yes, horses can totally do that. Though scientists aren't quite sure how this is done, it's believed to be the result of a natural chemical process within the mare if she senses that the eventual foal would be in danger from aggressive males vying for dominance. Research done on zebras showed that if even a single new male was brought into the herd, the foal's chances of survival fell to less than 5 percent. Yes, even worse than the Tasmanian devils up there.

GettyEach stripe is one more infanticide.

To solve this mystery, scientists laced the mother with mildly radioactive amino acids. Unfortunately, the experiment was a dismal failure, because the mamma pipefish did not develop any super powers whatsoever. It did, however, let them track the eggs and find out that dad was eating them like embryonic popcorn. Now, you may say that this isn't all that weird as far as animals are concerned -- animals are stupid, after all, and one day dad probably just got hungry and was like, "Hey! Somebody left some eggs here!"

Prilfish"Oh, don't look at me that way, honey. We'll forget about this in three -- hey, somebody left some eggs here!"

But researchers also discovered that males would eat more of the embryos of small or unattractive females. They will sometimes abort/eat up to half of the younglings of a homely mate. By restricting the flow of nutrients to the brood pouch, the babies are left to fight for the scarce resources. Only the strong survive ... and dad consumes the rest. Which only makes sense. If you're going to have ugly kids, why not just eat them before they hatch?

Steve ChildsOh sure, that's a fine rule for fish. But the second you apply it to cats, everyone starts yelling and calling the police.

Science speculates that pipefish do this because they simply don't want to waste resources on offspring that aren't genetically fit (i.e., the ugly ones). So yes, they devour babies and they're shallow.

Steve Childs"Babies are like beers -- the uglier they are, the more of them you need to consume."

But having too many dudes around is a waste of resources. And that's why the worker drone ladies will pretty much just kill a dude on sight. And we don't mean on occasion, either -- the female workers embark on a systematic killing of all the males during the larval stage.

ars.usda.gov Essentially, they're tiny little Amazon warriors.

As you can imagine, this presents a problem for the queen. She needs males to propagate the species. Without the lazy, good-for-nothing sperm donors, the species would die out. How do the two sides work out a solution? In short, the queen overwhelms the colony with male eggs while the female workers slaughter as many as they can, in hopes they will eventually get tired before murdering them all. As a result, a few boys do make it through the culling, but only because mass fratricide is apparently quite draining.

Marufish"Young lady, you stop murdering your brothers right this instant!"

So where do you find a species vicious enough to top that? Well, let's look at how the sharks do it ...

So before we get into the weird details, you probably assume that sharks will eat just about anything, including their own young. After all, sharks eat. It's what they do. They're eating machines. Nature lets them know this at the fetus stage by basically making them eat their own unborn siblings to survive.

You see, some sharks have live births with placentas, kind of like mammals. But others don't -- in other words, they have live babies, but don't have an organ to feed the developing fetuses. So guess where they get their nourishment.

That's right: Ovoviviparous sharks eat each other in the womb.

WikipediaParticularly nurse sharks, which just proves that science loves irony.

So these sharklets are attacking and killing each other before they're even born, but not just because they're vicious, soulless carnivores. The babies have to eat each other or they'll starve -- Mother Nature literally gave them no other choice. From their first wriggling moments of life, they find themselves in a tiny, pitch-dark enclosed place that they don't realize is about to become The Hunger Games.

There may be as many as 20 eggs starting out in two uteri, and each will hatch and live peacefully inside the mother. Maybe they all become friends. But very quickly they will develop jaws, and teeth, and they will grow hungry. They will look for food, find none, and finally realize in their tiny fetal shark brains that the only thing standing between them and starvation is their own brothers and sisters.

Wikipedia"I am not in the mood for your human bullshit. It's like Dawn of the Dead back here."

We can't know how painful for the mother this internal, frenzied death match is or isn't. But you'd have to think that having 20 sets of panicked, snapping shark jaws inside your belly would be a hell of a lot more than a tickle. It seems like they'd constantly be missing and biting off a big chunk of uterus instead.

Of the 20 shark babies that hatch, one from each uterus will survive to be born into the world. And each one will be one jaded son of a bitch.

noaa.gov"Just get inside. Everything is pointless."

Monte Richard is a columnist for The Daft Gadgets. You can also check out his blog.

For reasons you shouldn't appreciate your mother, check out 7 Things 'Good Parents' Do (That Screw Up Kids For Life) and Your Mom Lied: 5 Common Body Myths Debunked.