Lessons from nature

If you've had a summer of your children constantly demanding food - I'm led to believe the appetite of a teenager can be particularly voracious - then you may or may not like to consider this parenting strategy from the animal kingdom.

Burying beetles occasionally punish young who nag for food by eating those who pester them most, according to Edinburgh University research.

It encourages the larvae to plead more honestly according to how hungry they are and not try to outdo their siblings by pestering their mother for food.
It also helps the mother beetle to maintain a degree of control over how she feeds her squabbling offspring.

Yes, I know it's the wrong kind of beetle.

Dr Clare Andrews, of the University of Edinburgh's school of biological sciences, said: "We already knew that larvae beg more if they have been deprived of food but we had not known whether this is because they are informing their parents how hungry they are or whether they are simply squabbling with each other to get their parents' attention.
"Our study shows that if you're a baby beetle it doesn't pay to pester your mother for food unless you're really hungry.

At least I'm not a shark

Apologies for the lack of blogging activity lately, following my initial flurry. Rather predictably I've been busy being a Dad! As I may have mentioned, holding down a full time job while being as good a Dad as possible while also trying to retain some sense of self and former life – in other words drinking waaay too much and staying out past, ooh, 10 o'clock – can really take its toll.

Still, things are tougher in the animal world. Consider this piece from the fantastic science journalist Ed Yong. He points out that males have to compete for sex through a variety of elaborate rituals and cumbersome appendages, but that it doesn't end there.

In many animals, females exert a surprising amount of choice over who fathers their young. Even after sex, females can store the sperm of different partners in separate compartments and determine which ones get to fertilise her eggs.
For males, this means that sexual competition continues after sex. It’s not just about finding mates, but about ensuring that your sperm fertilises her eggs. This leads to fierce “sperm competitions” and bizarre adaptations, where males scrape away the sperm of past mates, guard or plug females so they can no longer accept partners, 'traumatically inseminate' her through her back, or even poison partners with toxic sperm to limit future sexual encounters.

But in sand tiger sharks this reaches new, cannibalistic levels… head over to the National Geographic site to find out more, but suffice to say that even if a male successfully fertilises a female's eggs he would be advised not to start bragging to all his mates about impending fatherhood just yet.

'I'm going to be a Dad! What? Oh no!'

Not the most auspicious start to fatherhood

Another weird and wonderful tale from the animal world, described by Ed Yong on 'Not exactly rocket science'.

'For a small Amazonian frog called Rhinella proboscidea, death is no impediment to sex. The males form huge mating balls in which dozens of individuals compete to fertilise a female. These competitions are so intense, and the combined males so heavy, that the poor female sometimes drowns in the struggle.

But for the males, that’s not a deal-breaker. Thiago Izzo from Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research has found that the males can force the eggs from the bodies of the deceased female, and fertilise them. It’s a unique strategy and one that effectively involves sexual reproduction with a dead partner. Izzo calls “functional necrophilia”.'

...'Dad, how did you meet Mum and how did I get born?' 'Umm...' 

Let's start at the beginning…

'You and me baby ain't nothing but mammals, so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel'
The Bloodhound Gang

I never imagined I would start my first blog post proper with a lyric from a Bloodhound Gang song, but I thought it might be illuminating to turn to the animal kingdom for some great and terrible Dads. Can us human Dads feel good about ourselves in comparison?

Here are my top three Dads from nature:

1) The hardhead catfish carries up to 48 eggs in his mouth for two months. How does he eat? He doesn't.
2) Penguins. -40ºc. Enough said.

3) Foxes. Red fox (Vulpes vulpes) fathers are extremely attentive dads in the first few months after their pups are born. As the mother remains in the den with the newborns, the fox dad heads out to hunt and brings back food for the whole family at least a few times each day. These reynards also seem to be keen on keeping young pups active, having been observed playing with them and leading them around their territory. I have to say, though, there's a touch of Chris Rock's 'you feed your kids and play with them? Congratulations, you low-expectation-having motherfucker!' about this one.

A note about seahorses. Everyone goes on about seahorses. Sure, they stow fertilised eggs in their brood pouches, giving them nutrients, oxygen and a cosy environment for 1.5- to 6.5 weeks. However, if a male judges its female mate to be subpar, it will not direct as many nutrients toward the developing eggs that are ensconced in its pouch – and sometimes males will absorb the eggs entirely, using their nutrients as a food source. 

Here are my worst three Dads from nature. This mostly revolves around eating your own young, which is covered in Lesson 1 of Dad school:

1) When newborn bass swim away, their Dad proudly watches them swim into the distance. But if there are stragglers, he swallows them up as a reward to himself for helping the strong ones stay alive.

2) Lions are greedy and lazy. Not content with letting the females do all the hunting and most of the parenting, the male lion is always the first one to eat and often leaves only scraps for the rest of the pride. In lean hunting seasons, an alpha lion will let his wives and children starve first.
3) Assassin bugs. With a name like that, perhaps expectations are not high. All he has to do is protect the eggs, but he tends to eat the ones on the outside edges of the brood, which are otherwise most likely to fall victim to parasitic wasps. This strategy is so hardwired that they do it even in laboratory settings completely devoid of potential parasites. Interestingly, assassin bugs do have a bit of a soft spot – the males are some of the only insects that are willing to adopt broods from other fathers. (They don’t eat any extra eggs when their kids are adopted.)

A special mention must go to the orb-web spider Nephilengys malabarensis. The brilliant Ed Yong describes how the male snaps off his own genitals inside the female and runs away. His severed organ continues to pump sperm into the female (indeed, at a faster rate). This allows him to fertilise her remotely, while denying entry to other males. It also means he's less likely to get eaten, a fate that awaits 75% of males during sex.

Now is that being a good Dad or not? I'm not sure, but if the media is to be believed that's about the sum total contribution of most human Dads.