Since today is Mother's Day, here's a look at the spectrum of mother and offspring relationships on our planet. While humans are fond of baby wraps, backpacks and strollers, other species have their own creative ways of transporting their young.
- American alligator mothers often help their babies move around by letting them ride on their heads or sometimes even giving them a lift in their mouths.
- Wolf spiders actually carry their egg sacs around with them and when the baby spiders hatch, they climb onto their mother's abdomen for the first few days before heading off to live on their own. One Australian discovered this the hard way. [VIDEO]
- This species of toad in South America embeds her fertilized eggs into her back. When they hatch, the tadpoles literally come out of her skin. [VIDEO]
- Everyone's favorite baby transporter, the kangaroo, has its famous stomach pouch, but I bet you didn't know that baby kangaroos blindly crawl along their mother's body from her uterus to the pouch right after birth. [VIDEO]
If that's not enough of an animal fix for you, here's a photo album from National Geographic of mothers and babies from across the animal kingdom.
And now for the rest of the week's geek:
- What does climate change actually sound like? Listen to the temperature changes in the Northern Hemisphere as played by a string quartet. [VIDEO]
- What do fish feel when they swim? SCIENCE can answer that.
- This invasive species of fire ant is essentially an expert at excavation.
- Fossils for brain regions of different species can tell us how and when heads first evolved.
- Speaking of brains, this MIT student filmed his own brain surgery.
- Geoscientists have found a way to study the health of forest canopies by detecting the fluorescence of photosynthesis byproducts from space.
- Those of you in the snow belt might be familiar with using snow to clean your car mirrors. Turns out NASA does it too!…sort of.
- The Sun got a little too into the Cinco de Mayo spirit with a powerful solar flare. [VIDEO]
- Emergency responders in Nepal located and saved four individuals with a portable radar unit from NASA that detected their heartbeats in the rubble.
- Astronomers in Australia interested in fast radio bursts got some signal interference from an unlikely source: their eating habits.
- Setting up a settlement on Mars just got a little trickier with the prevalence of perchlorate in the Martian soil.
Keep on geeking!
@Summer_Ash, In-house Astrophysicist