Hacker News Reader

Comment by thfuran | Hacker News Reader

>A mother's love is unconditional like 99% of the time regardless of the species

That's just BS. In many species, the mother never has any interaction at all with the young. In some species, it's not particularly uncommon for a mother to eat her young.

View on HN

> "mammal mothers eating their young are relatively rare and usually occur under extreme stress or adverse conditions"

perhaps i meant to say just mammals? would be cool if neuroscience advanced enough to figure out what makes mammals specifically different but alas like Moses won't live long enough to see that day

Generally, a tendency for a type of animal to eat its young correlates to a strategy of producing a lot of them. Rabbits, for instance. I'm blanking on the name of it but this is one of a pair of strategies where the other is to be long-lived - like humans, or at the extreme end, the greenland shark, which has a very low metabolism. That's the alternate way of persisting as a species: do nothing, and especially don't die.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

That's the one! My mind was polluted with "A/B testing".

Not only mammals, birds seem to have it from the same origin.

Also, some reptiles and fish care for their children. Some arthropod too. So it looks like reasonably easy to evolve.

That proves it, they love their offspring so much, they could just eat them all up, hair and nails.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com