Which animal mother sacrifices the most? The strongest scientific candidate is a deep-sea octopus that guarded her eggs for 53 months without, as far as researchers could tell, eating a meal, the longest brooding period known for any animal. Most mothers in the natural world make less extreme bargains, but the pattern is the same: time, food, safety and energy are spent on the young instead of on herself.
This collection gathers 21 photographs and posts of animal mothers with their young, from a polar bear lifting a cub out of its den to a sea otter using her own chest as a raft, a red fox vixen putting up with a tail-biting kit and a lioness letting her cub practise its pounce on her face. Each picture comes with a short note on who took it and on what science says about how that species raises its offspring: how long the young stay, what the mother teaches, and why the effort pays off.
A word on the emotions in these images. Scientists are careful about reading human feelings into animal faces, and so are we. What can be said with confidence is that in mammals and in many birds, survival of the young depends on long, costly care, and evolution has favoured mothers who provide it.
Carried and cradled: bears, gorillas, kangaroos and otters
A polar bear mother lifts her cub by the scruff at the mouth of a snow-covered den, a stock photograph from Shutterstock. In the wild, females dig maternity dens between August and October and give birth there in winter to cubs that weigh only about 600 grams. Mother and cubs do not emerge until late February to early April, by which time the cubs weigh 10 to 15 kilograms.
A gorilla mother walks off with a bundle of greens in her hand and her infant clinging to her back, photographed by Holger Link and shared on Unsplash. Gorilla mothers look after their young for the first three to four years. Because care lasts so long, a female raises an offspring that survives to adulthood only once every six to eight years.
Photographer Quentin Chester caught this kangaroo joey in Western Australia, near Margaret River, looking far too big for its mother's pouch. A kangaroo is born after about a month of gestation, no bigger than a bean, and crawls through its mother's fur to the pouch on its own. It starts leaving the pouch at around six months and stops returning at about eight, although the mother keeps feeding it until about 18 months.
Kangaroo mothers have another remarkable trick: they can produce two different kinds of milk at the same time, one for a tiny pouch young and one for an older joey at foot.
Wildlife photographer Suzi Eszterhas posted this sea otter pup asleep on its mother's chest during Sea Otter Awareness Week in September 2018. A sea otter mother spends hours licking and fluffing her newborn's coat, which traps so much air that the pup floats like a cork. When she dives for food she may leave it bobbing at the surface, sometimes wrapped in kelp so it does not drift away.
Patience on four legs: grizzlies, salukis and rescued young
Wildlife photographer Daisy Gilardini shared this grizzly scene for Mother's Day 2018. Brown bear mothers raise their cubs alone and keep them close for two to three seasons, teaching them where to find food through the year. Tolerance is part of the job: cubs climb, wrestle and chew on their mother long before they can look after themselves.
Not every mother in this list is wild. Bianca, a saluki from the Hiddekel kennel in Poland, is shown here with her son. Salukis are a sighthound breed with roots in the Middle East, and like all dogs the mother nurses and cleans her puppies through the first weeks, while the breeder handles socialisation once the litter starts to explore.
This photograph by Barbara Hollweg was published by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) on its animal rescue Flickr account. IFAW runs rescue and rehabilitation work for orphaned wildlife, which is a reminder of how much depends on a mother: young mammals that lose theirs usually need years of human care before they can be released.
Grooming, play and the everyday work of bonding
A Getty Images photograph of a mother and her young sharing a moment at close quarters. Contact like this is not idle. In most mammals, touch, warmth and play are how the young learn to read their own species, and close contact keeps them within reach when danger appears.
Oslo-based photographer Jon Langeland caught a leopard mother being groomed by her cub. Leopards are solitary cats, so a cub has only its mother to learn from, and it typically stays with her until it can hunt for itself. Mutual grooming keeps fur clean and parasites down, and it also helps the pair stay bonded.
Brittany Crossman photographed this red fox vixen and her kits in spring in her home town in Canada. Red fox litters average four to six kits. For the first two to three weeks the vixen rarely leaves the den, and the father or helper vixens from the previous year bring her food. Kits start coming out to play and to taste solid food at three to four weeks old.
The Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C., posted this mother and young for Mother's Day 2018. Zoos with breeding programmes for threatened species watch births closely, because a first-time mother does not always know what to do, and keepers sometimes have to step in when she does not.
Another image from Getty Images, here showing a less peaceful moment. Mothers also discipline. In many species a mother will push away, nip or ignore an offspring that nurses too long or plays too rough, which helps wean the young and teaches the limits of what is acceptable in the group.
Learning to climb, swim and follow
An orangutan mother hangs from a branch with her infant held against her, in a photograph credited to wildlife photographer Mogens Trolle. No ape stays with its mother longer: orangutan mothers can nurse for up to eight years, longer than any other mammal, and wait six to nine years between births. Young orangutans watch their mothers build nests in the trees, start practising at about six months and get good at it by about three.
Wildlife photographer Raven Sky shared these long-beaked common dolphins for Mother's Day 2018. Dolphin calves are born tail first and must reach the surface for their first breath within seconds, so the mother stays alongside and the calf swims in her slipstream, saving energy while it grows.
Jon Langeland again, this time with a mother leading a single-file line of young, which his caption sums up as knowing whom to follow. For many young animals, following a parent closely is the first survival skill: the mother knows where food, water and shelter are, and the young learn the route by staying in her wake.
Daisy Gilardini photographed this polar bear cub grabbing a ride on its mother's backside as she slid downhill through deep snow in Wapusk National Park, in Manitoba, Canada. She had been resting in a day den on the way to the sea ice. Polar bear cubs stay with their mother for up to two and a half years, learning to hunt seals before they are left to fend for themselves.
Big cats, chimpanzees and foxes at rest and play
In Tanzania's Serengeti National Park, Jacob Boden watched a lion cub practise its hunting moves on its mother, who simply put up with it. Lion cubs first show stalking behaviour at around three months, but they do not join hunts until they are almost a year old and only become effective hunters near two.
Neal Cooper took this picture in Kenya's Maasai Mara as two hungry cubs looked up at their mother when she rose to her feet. Lionesses in a pride often give birth around the same time and nurse each other's cubs, and the young are weaned after about six or seven months.
Wildlife photographer Thomas D. Mangelsen titled this relaxed chimpanzee picture "Laid Back" and took it at Gombe National Park in Tanzania, where Jane Goodall began her chimpanzee research in 1960. Chimpanzee young stay with their mothers for years, learning which foods to eat and how to use tools by watching closely.
A red fox kit grips its mother's tail, in a photograph by Russian nature photographer Igor Shpilenok, who works in the wild landscapes of Kamchatka. Fox parents tolerate a great deal of this kind of play, and they even bring live prey for kits to practise on, which is how the young learn the moves they will later need.
The last image, again from Getty Images, shows a mother sheltering her young, the posture that best sums up this collection. Protection is often the most dangerous part of motherhood: the mother is the one who stands between her young and a predator.
The octopus that guarded her eggs for 53 months
The record holder for maternal sacrifice lives far from any camera on Instagram. In April 2007, a team led by Bruce Robison of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute spotted a female deep-sea octopus, Graneledone boreopacifica, wrapped around a clutch of about 160 eggs on a rock ledge some 1,400 metres down in Monterey Canyon, California.
The researchers kept visiting with a remotely operated vehicle. She was still there in September 2011. When they returned in October 2011, the eggs had hatched and she was gone: a brooding period of 53 months. She ignored crab offered by the robot arm, and the team found no sign that she ate during that time. Octopus mothers of this kind die once their eggs hatch.
Cold, deep water slows development, which helps explain why the wait was so long; researchers have suggested that the extra time lets the young hatch larger and better able to fend for themselves. The study was published in the journal PLoS ONE in 2014.
What animal mothers have in common
Set side by side, these species show a simple rule: the longer and harder the young take to grow up, the more the mother gives. A kangaroo joey needs most of a year in the pouch, a polar bear cub two and a half years at its mother's side, an orangutan up to eight years of milk. Animals that raise few young invest heavily in each one.
Mothers do not do all of it alone. Fox fathers bring food, lionesses nurse each other's cubs, and young vixens help raise their siblings. If you want to see this kind of behaviour yourself, keep your distance: a mother with young is often the most defensive animal in the landscape, and wildlife photographers capture these scenes with long lenses and a great deal of patience.
Sources: photographs by the credited photographers via Shutterstock, Holger Link / Unsplash, Mogens Trolle, Igor Shpilenok, Instagram, IFAW on Flickr and Getty Images; National Geographic: octopus broods for 53 months; Wikipedia on the polar bear, kangaroo, sea otter, orangutan, western gorilla, lion and red fox. Original collection: Bright Side.
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