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Bad mothers and why they make a difference to cheetah survival

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C C Offline
https://aeon.co/ideas/bad-mothers-and-wh...h-survival

EXCERPT: I have a sneaking sympathy for female cheetahs who don’t have cubs. Usually, if a female doesn’t produce independent offspring, eyebrows are raised, and judgmental comments about ‘bad mothers’ are bandied about. But whenever I watch a cheetah being used as a jungle gym by her cubs, bitten, patted, stalked and jumped on, having her tail pulled while trying to sleep in peace, or keeping a look-out for predators while her cubs eat, I think of Cambazola.

Cambazola never managed to raise a cub. She started several litters but almost all of them died young. By the time I knew her, Cambazola was middle-aged and utterly cub-free. [...] she would spend all day lounging on a termite mound, snoozing when she felt tired. When she was hungry, she would go and calmly catch a gazelle, no cubs bounding out of hiding at an inopportune moment and ruining the hunt. No one used her as playground equipment. There are certainly perks to being bad at this whole mothering business.

Cambazola was not alone in being terrible at raising cubs. The Serengeti Cheetah Project has kept track of individual cheetahs [...] By watching generations of fuzzy cubs grow up and have cubs of their own, we can construct maternal lineages of cheetahs. One of the things we’ve learned is that the majority of female cheetahs in Serengeti never manage to raise a single cub, despite giving birth to multiple litters. [...] we can trace many of the cheetahs in Serengeti back to a couple of SuperMoms [...] who manage to raise more than two cubs to independence in their lifetime. Cambazola’s grandmother was a SuperMom with five cubs that made it to adulthood, including Cambazola’s mother Camembert. But the cheese lineage stopped at Cambazola. What makes SuperMoms different from females such as Cambazola, who are unable to raise a single cub?...

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