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Poor cichlid mother! Hatching babies with their mouths thinks they're safe, but they're being parasitized by cuckoos!

author:Xu Dewen Science Channel
Poor cichlid mother! Hatching babies with their mouths thinks they're safe, but they're being parasitized by cuckoos!

What is the most shameless and vicious bird in the world? I am afraid that it is not a cuckoo bird, it will lay eggs in the nests of other birds, let others help it hatch, and the hatched little cuckoo birds are also extremely vicious, and will squeeze the main owner's eggs out of the nest to be crushed, and they can enjoy the "step" of their parents' upbringing with peace of mind.

Poor cichlid mother! Hatching babies with their mouths thinks they're safe, but they're being parasitized by cuckoos!

This behavior also occurs in a variety of birds, and there is a term for egg parasitism, which the birds who are victims must also hate it, and if they can write, they force a banner to write the word to protest on the Champs Elysées, although I am not sure if they have heard of it.

But now, if you only know that the cuckoo bird has this vicious behavior, it is a bit out, because in Lake Tanganyika in East Africa, there is a kind of cuckoo catfish, and this kind of bad behavior has also been learned, and it is even worse than the cuckoo bird. A team led by Marcus Cohen, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Colorado boulder, recently observed and studied the practices of the cuckoo catfish, which will be published next month in the Natural Science Society Journal b.

Poor cichlid mother! Hatching babies with their mouths thinks they're safe, but they're being parasitized by cuckoos!

The cuckoo catfish on Lake Tanganyika, whose real name is synodontis multipunctatus, this time the victim is a model fish that is very responsible for children, a thick-lipped cichlid. In order to protect the safety of the child, the cichlid can be described as painstaking, after laying eggs, it will carefully suck the eggs into its own mouth, so that its mouth becomes a hotbed for babies, until they hatch, grow up to go out to forage for food, will let the children leave their own hotbed.

Poor cichlid mother! Hatching babies with their mouths thinks they're safe, but they're being parasitized by cuckoos!

However, even if it is so careful and lonely, the baby catfish's nest will also be targeted by cuckoo catfish. When it lays its eggs, the cuckoo catfish thief couple will also sneak under it, lay eggs, and in the confusion let the cichlid suck them together into their mouths.

The eggs of the catfish hatch faster, and after these vicious little cuckoo catfish hatch, they will murder and eat the hatched cichlid babies in the mouth of the cichlid mother, and even kill their own brothers after eating, which can be said to be extremely vicious.

Poor cichlid mother! Hatching babies with their mouths thinks they're safe, but they're being parasitized by cuckoos!

Even more vicious than their land "cousin" cuckoos is that some cichlid mothers are smart enough not to put these catfish eggs in their mouths, and these swaddling cuckoo catfish eggs will still hatch on their own, and then mix together to re-enter the cichlid mother's mouth when they eat to release the baby cichlids. If the cuckoo bird lays its eggs in another nest just because it is lazy and unwilling to build a nest, this cuckoo catfish is purely evil, and it can hatch and survive without the mouth of the mother of the cichlid, but it has to burrow into another nest and kill.

It's so vicious, I can't write it anymore, how can people, no, how can a fish be so vicious? But nature is like this, far more complicated than we think, you think that animals are brainless fools, in fact, in order to survive they are also trying their best, and even some strange things you can't imagine. Compared to them, we humans seem to be kinder, at least without having to go on a killing spree to survive.

David Science public number: xudewen028, the latest, cutting-edge, the most interesting!

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