Celebrate Mother’s Day with nine bold, beautiful and bizarre animal moms

May 10, 2026

4 min read

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Celebrate Mother’s Day with nine bold, beautiful and bizarre animal moms

Here are some of the most fascinating facts about animal moms, from naked mole rats to giraffes and octopuses

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron

A naked mole rat queen in brood chamber suckling babies.

Neil Bromhall/Getty Images

Motherhood in the animal kingdom is a mixed bag. Take pregnancy: a female alpine salamander may gestate its young for as long as four years—typically the longest pregnancy of any animal—while opossum gestation times can be as short as around two weeks. Parenting styles differ, too: some whales live in female-led groups for generations, while other animals (see: snakes, fish, turtles) leave their young to fend for themselves from birth. And sure, animals such as starfish and flatworms can reproduce by cloning themselves—but at the end of the day, in most species, the survival of animals rests on their mothers.

In honor of Mother’s Day, we dug into the Scientific American archives and found nine of the most bold, beautiful and bizarre things animal moms do. Here are the highlights:

Crocodiles listen to their babies’ calls—from inside the egg

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Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus), with eggs.

Sylvain CORDIER/Getty Images

When young crocodiles are ready to hatch, they let out calls that sound a bit like a sci-fi laser sound effect. When a mother crocodile hears those calls, she’ll dig out the nest in preparation for her babies’ arrival.

The Tennessee winnow ant poses as a false queen to lay her eggs

The Aphaenogaster tennesseensis ant.

Clarence Holmes Wildlife/Alamy

Some mothers will do anything for their kids. That’s especially true for the Tennessee winnow ant: a mother ant ensures her offspring’s survival by killing—and then chemically impersonating—the queen of another species’ colony, entomologist Alex Wild wrote in Scientific American in 2013. Slowly, the false queen’s own progeny replaces the parasitized colony. (This “impersonation” tactic is apparently common among parasitic ants.)

Naked mole rat queens can have more than two dozen babies at a time

A naked mole rat queen in brood chamber suckling babies.

Neil Bromhall/Getty Images

Ants aren’t the only animals with queens. Naked mole rats also have a matriarch: A naked mole rat queen may have several litters per year, with possibly more than two dozen babies per litter. In most cases, after the queen dies, the remaining female rodents battle to crown a successor.

Side-blotched lizard moms help their offspring “dress for success”

Side-blotched lizard (Uta stansburiana).

Timothy Cota/Getty Images

In 2007 researchers discovered that female side-blotched lizards can help give their offspring a leg up in the world with estradiol, a hormone the moms deposit into the eggs, Scientific American reported at the time. Adding more of this hormone influences the markings on their babies’ backs—either bars or stripes—which provide different forms of camouflage in different environments.

Giraffes may “mourn” the death of their young

Adult and young reticulated giraffe.

Robert Muckley/Getty Images

Scientists have studied “mourning” behavior in a number of species—elephants, whales, dolphins, dogs, and more. But giraffes may have the capacity to mourn, too, anthropologist Barbara King, the author of How Animals Grieve, wrote in Scientific American in 2013. In one 2010 incident, for instance, after a young giraffe calf died, its mother and more than a dozen other female giraffes gathered around the body in an apparent “protective response,” suggesting that they may have felt a form of “grief,” King wrote.

Chimpanzees are “hands-on” parents

A mother chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) with offspring at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania.

Avalon/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

In a 2024 study, researchers found that chimpanzee mothers tended to step in to defend their children in quarrels—say, over food or space in a tree—in about half of cases the researchers observed in the wild. The apes’ close relatives, bonobos, however, were more laissez-faire and rarely stepped in.

That’s not to say bonobos are “bad” mothers, one of the study’s co-authors, primatologist Martin Surbeck, told Scientific American. It may just be that intervening is not as big of an “aspect” of their mothering—unlike that of the protective chimps.

Cuckoo mothers leave their