Some of you have or will end up with, biological progeny. Like it or not, this is a fact. Some look forward to it as their greatest potential joy, and some dread the prospect more than bubonic plague. Nature is not kind to parents in many ways; it shortens lifespans, drains resources, and requires years of labor—which is often repaid with a "Fuck you, I’ll join a suicide cult if I want to!". Yes, it may be written into our DNA to reproduce, but free will and sentience have allowed some of us to say "Oh, helll naw" to parenthood. Other animals don’t have the option to use prophylactics or abortifacients—Sally the Sturgeon’s only recourse is to find a fisherman who will sell her salty roe for an exorbitant fee and leave her corpse forgotten. With that in mind, let us examine some of the shittier parental experiences to be had in the world of fauna.
There’s a lot to be said for being an octopus. You can pick Davey Jones’ locker, clean your glasses, masturbate, catch a crab mid-crawl, use the remote, smoke a blunt, hold a beer, and still have a tentacle left to pick your nose (though you wouldn’t have a nose or most of this stuff, but you get the idea) at the same damn time. You can fit through just about any aperture that’s larger than your beak, so, like, squirming through a glory hole to give a heart attack to any would-be visitors would be on the table, if you felt like it. You can shapeshift and color change and all kinds of cool shit. What you can’t do is live very long. If you’re a male octopus, you fuck, you die. If you’re a chicktopus, you mate, lovingly care for your brood of eggs, and die, just as they’re about to hatch. If you’re lucky, you may live long enough to see one of the ungrateful brats swim off into the unknown.
You’d think living in Antarctica would be shit enough, that Mother Nature would maybe ease up in some compensatory way, but nope. That nasty bitch just can’t let anyone have fun. Emperor penguin males carefully tend to the egg their female counterparts laid over a period of two months, in temperatures as low as -40 degrees Celsius (-104 degrees Fahrenheit), without eating once. Mom is busy carousing around, fattening up, and getting ready to share her slice of familial misery. By the time she gets back to her dude, he weighs half as much as he did when she left. At this point, the male penguins go off, presumably to Olive Garden or something, because of endless pasta and breadsticks, amiright?
In what may be an attempt to placate a horrific practice, crab spiders (Diaea ergandros) offer their spiderlings unfertilized eggs (called "nurse eggs") to eat, but when these are inevitably not enough, the ravenous young slowly consume their own mama. Over a period of weeks, they gnaw and pick away at her until she dies, and probably some more after that, too. It’s known as matriphagy (the act of eating one’s mom) and is found in a few species, including scorpions, nematode worms, and some spiders, but this one stands out as truly grotesque.
To be fair, this one sucks for everyone, but you don’t remember what happens when you’re a baby, so fuck ’em—I pity the moms here. These smooth-brained dipshits have decided to subsist entirely on eucalyptus, which, if you don’t know, is fucking poisonous. It’s even poison to koalas, at least at first. So, to acclimate their bebe’s digestive system to this toxin, they have to feed their babies their own poop. Think of a nightmare version of Westley in the Princess Bride, acclimating himself to poison. As an added bonus, they feed their babies poop from other koalas as well, for variety, I guess?
In what may be the worst cause of trypophobia to exist, the Surinam toad also wins the award for "ickiest birthing process ever." During their bizarre, acrobatic mating ritual, the toad couple manages to somehow get all the fertilized eggs strapped onto mom’s dorsal epidermis. Over the next day or so, the eggs slowly sink into (yes, into) her skin. Think of, like, the nopiest backpack imaginable. Once in place, the eggs develop, hatch into tadpoles, and eventually develop into toadlets—all inside their grotesque little pods. Finally, after 12-20 weeks, the baby Surinam toads emerge from their mother’s flesh (which can’t feel good—though it’s probably better than having wads of squirming babies living under your skin). Eventually, the mother toad sloughs off the extra skin that the babies developed in, at which point she can start the repulsive process all over again... Oh. Sounds great.
Mayflies are here for a good time, not a long time. With lives as brief as a day or two, they’re basically just here for long enough to participate in a big, wild orgy. Once the pipe has been laid, so to speak, the mother mayflies kick around long enough to lay their eggs—the males may drop dead even sooner than that, though, as they pretty much did what they were there to do. Their lives as larvae are somewhat more placid, eating algae and chillin’, but once they emerge as adults, the party is on. In fact, they live such short lives after reaching maturity that in their final form, they don’t even have any mouths at all. Guess no cocktails at the sex party. Lame!
More matriphagy. It sure looks like a worm, but nope, these limbless amphibians are actually vertebrates who thought worms were the coolest fucking things, and then, like, the very next day, started copying the way they dress and act and everything. Like, guh, get your own personality or whatever. One thing that makes being a caecilian significantly suckier though, is their cycle of parenthood. These creatures are viviparous, which means the eggs hatch inside the body of the animals. While they’re up in there, the babies scrape off the lining of the oviduct (kinda like a fallopian tube) with their tiny little teeth. In another species of caecilian, the babies eat hunks of the body of their mother after being born for nourishment. Fucking yikes. The flesh does grow back there, but this feels like cold comfort because it just means you might have to go through that again.
So, there are some very good reasons that "parenting is hard" isn’t a specifically human thing—in some cases, our own species’ hardships as genetic Petri dishes are severely overshadowed. Either way, don’t forget to bring a rubber next time you think you might get lucky, ’cause even if we don’t get consumed by our young, babies are loud, and child support is expensive. Also, you should probably call your mother and thank her at some point.
Esmeralda Rupp-Spangle is a proud parent of the future dictator of Earth and an occasional writer. She can be found on Instagram as @EsmeraldaSilentCitadel and Facebook as Esmeralda Marina.
