Naked Mole Rat

It may seem glamorous to be queen, but for a naked mole rat, the title comes with heavy responsibilities. This subterranean monarch must birth all of the colony’s young herself. She gets pregnant over and over and over again—in captivity, five times a year—pushing out a dozen or so pink pups each time. Did I mention she might live for more than thirty years?!

Plainfin Midshipman

Among these big-lipped toadfish, a male can only keep a partner interested for as long as it takes her to lay eggs in his shoreline nest. When she flees for the open ocean, never to return, devoted Dad stays wedged beneath a rock, guarding his eggs for months until they hatch. Every time the tide goes out, he is a literal fish out of water.

Orca

A mother orca’s calves never move out. Matriarchs live with their kids and eventually their grandkids, continuing to provide help and food until they die. In some pods, the most dependent offspring are adult sons over thirty—massive man-children who might not survive without their aging mothers.

Meerkat

For meerkats, raising pups is a group effort. Their colonies are so cooperative that even the animals who aren’t parents work hard at child care. Male and female helpers babysit pups, playing with them, protecting them from predators, and bringing them savory snacks like scorpions with their stingers tenderly removed. Some female helpers even lactate so they can nurse the youngest pups, without being mothers themselves.

Burying Beetle

Picture it: Together, Mom and Dad build a beautiful nursery for their babies. They find the perfect dead mouse, remove its fur, coat it with goo, and roll it into a tidy ball. Once buried in the soil below, it provides a cozy cradle made of a ready meal. So why, oh why, do those larvae keep begging their parents to regurgitate meals from their own mandibles? Is there no quantity of snacks that will satisfy a youngster?

Reed Warbler 

Here are parents so dedicated to their nesting, they fail to notice a suspicious cuckoo flying off into the leaves, or that their clutch now holds an extra egg. Or how, after hatching early, one featherless chick crawls around the nest shoving all the warbler eggs over the edge. Their commitment to feeding this hungry one never wavers, even as it grows several times larger than its unwitting foster parents.

African Elephant

The only way to eat an elephant, the saying goes, is one bite at a time. The only way to grow an elephant is also slow and arduous: African elephant moms have the longest gestation of any mammal, and stay pregnant for an interminable twenty-two months.

Caecilian

There’s no mother quite like a caecilian. Odd and legless, least loved of amphibians, she gives herself to her babies. Literally. They swarm over her, tearing off strips of fatty skin to eat, peeling their mother like a long, regretful banana.

Human

Anthropologists think we humans evolved to share the work of caregiving with extended family or other community. We aren’t meant to go it alone in isolated units. If parenting ever feels lonely or relentless, maybe it’s because so many of us are living contrary to our true nature.

Learn more about animal caregiving in The Creatures’ Guide to Caring.