A new study on mongoose society has found that because mothers in groups of mongooses all give birth on the same night, this creates a “veil of

Mongooses have a “fair society” because moms care for all the group’s pups as their own

submited by

Style Pass

2021-07-06 16:30:05

A new study on mongoose society has found that because mothers in groups of mongooses all give birth on the same night, this creates a “veil of ignorance” about which pups belong to which moms. And this leads to the pups being raised equitably, in a communal fashion.

The new paper appeared today in the journal Nature Communications, and was written by researchers from the universities of Exeter and Roehampton.

In the new study, half of the pregnant mothers in wild mongoose groups were regularly given extra food, which deliberately led to increased inequality in the birth weights of their pups.

But after giving birth, the mothers who had received extra food quickly corrected this inequality. They gave extra care to the smaller pups born to the unfed mothers — rather than their own pups — and the pup size differences quickly disappeared.

“In most of the natural world, parents favour their own young,” said co-author Harry Marshall of the University of Roehampton. But in groups of mongooses, the evolution of birth synchrony — whereby the mongoose moms all give birth on the same night, presumably to protect the pups from predators — has led to “the unusual situation that mothers don’t know which pups are their own, and therefore cannot choose to give them extra care.”