Simone M. Scully

When you think of a “great” mom, certain qualities like patience, dedication and love likely come to mind. After all, those are the qualities that, as humans, we value in our own mothers. But humans aren’t the only “super moms” on this planet. In the animal kingdom, many moms show great levels of dedication, attentiveness, and even selflessness while caring for their young.

“Maternal care has evolved repeatedly across different species,” says Dr. Ben Dantzer, assistant Professor of Psychology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. “The reason it would evolve is simply that there is this period of time when offspring are highly vulnerable, so anything to increase the chances of offspring surviving is going to be favored.” After all, that’s how to ensure the survival of your species as a whole.

Admittedly, maternal care is not the same across all species. Some birds — such as cuckoos — practice brood parasitism, laying their eggs in other birds’ nests and sloughing off their parental responsibility altogether, while making it another bird’s job to hatch their eggs. Sea turtles, meanwhile, lay thousands of eggs in a shallow nest, and then simply leave. When their young hatch, they must make their way to the ocean all on their own, with many dying along the way because of high predation rates.

A female octopus pulls a boulder around herself to form a nest, where she is guarding her eggs. Octopus moms don’t even leave to eat while protecting their eggs. When the eggs finally hatch, the moms die, starving and exhausted.

But even when predation rates are high, maternal care does often evolve. “There are some species of salamanders where the mom lays eggs under a rock or log,” says Dantzer, “but then she sticks around to prevent fungal or algae growth that could kill the eggs and [she] otherwise protects the eggs from any other animal that would try to eat them.”

Female octopuses also lay thousands of eggs but then stick around, not even leaving to eat, so that they can guard their eggs and fan them to help ensure that they stay oxygenated and free of bacteria until they hatch — at which point the mom then dies.

In general, it seems like the level of maternal care across species essentially evolves as a series of tradeoffs, which are dependent on the life history of the species. For example, “some animals live a long time and take a long time to develop,” explains Dantzer, which then requires their mothers to invest time and energy into ensuring that their young grow up and learn the life skills that they need to survive and reach their own reproduction age. Meanwhile, “other species live fast, reproduce a bunch, and die young,” but since their young grow quickly, less maternal care is needed to ensure the survival of the species.

With every species, Dantzer says, “there is an evolutionary conflict that exists between the mom and the offspring. The offspring are trying to take everything they can get and the mothers are trying to optimize their investment so they have some [resources] left for other offspring or other future offspring.”

“Think of moms having a pie [of resources] to invest in their offspring,” he explains. “They can divide that in half where two kids get to share the whole pie, or they can divide it multiple times.” He continues, “in species that regularly produce more than one offspring, they have to adjust the ratio of how they invest their energy by either producing big offspring or many offspring.” Rarely can they do both.

Orangutan mothers nurse their babies up to 8 years — longer than any other primate.

For example, ungulates and many Savannah animals often have babies that are born ready to move with a herd, whereas bonobos, marsupials, and even humans have babies that still need a long time to develop before they can do anything on their own.

That means that when we think of the “super moms” of the animal kingdom, mammals or primates are often the first to come to mind because they are species that have fewer offspring but provide longer periods of care for their babies.

For example, says Dantzer, one “super mom” of the animal kingdom is the orangutan, a species that devotes a very large percentage of their total lifespan to caring for one individual baby. They nurse them up to 8 years — longer than any other primate. Orangutans can keep having babies well into their 40s, but they only have one baby at a time and reproduce only every 9 years or so. That means that over their lifetime, a female orangutan might only have 2-3 babies. Given that orangutans live about 50 years or so, Dantzer explains, that’s a huge time investment in raising just a few babies relative to their total lifespan.

But, that time investment in their baby helps the mom ensure that she can protect her baby when it is vulnerable and have the time to teach it important survival skills, such as how to find edible fruit, how to know when fruit is ripe, and how to build nests in tree-tops. And since they spend so long together, orangutan moms develop a very close bond with their babies. Maybe that’s why, according to the World Wildlife Fund, female orangutans are known to “visit” their mothers until they reach the age of 15 or 16.

Of course, orangutans aren’t the only species that dedicate years to their babies. Some species spend a lot of time dedicated to their offspring before they’re even born.

“One of the best mothers in the animal kingdom is the [African] elephant,” says Jan Vertefeuille, senior director for Advocacy and Wildlife Conservation at the World Wildlife Fund. “These mothers carry their babies for a whopping 22-month pregnancy – the longest gestation period of any mammal.”

While females have a new calf only every three to four years, that’s still a big investment — albeit prenatal — in one baby. And the care for the baby doesn’t stop once it’s born. “Elephants live in a matriarchal society, so female calves grow up to remain with their mothers their entire lives,” explains Vertefeuille, (though male elephants do tend to leave the herd as teenagers to live a more solo-type of existence).

It takes a village: Eiders often form teams with other mothers to raise and protect their young in huge ‘rafts’ of ducklings with multiple chaperones.

This means that female elephants get lots of time to learn how to be a good mom from their own mom and the rest of the herd. “Young females play an important role as ‘aunties’ to help raise the younger members of the herd, so they have had plenty of practice once they have their own young,” Vertefeuille explains. “Elephants are intensely social and family oriented, and mothers and aunts will go to great lengths to protect and nurture their young.”

Elephants aren’t the only ones that protect their young in groups. Sometimes being a good mom means taking advantage of any help that they can get. That’s why Vertefeuille says she likes to give a “good mom” shoutout to the humble common eider, a duck found on and near the ocean all across the northern United States and Canada.

“They often form teams with other mothers to raise and protect their young in huge ‘rafts’ of ducklings with multiple chaperones,” she says. “You can sometimes see dozens and dozens of ducklings with their mothers swimming together.”

However, spending a long time with your offspring and protecting them aren’t the only kinds of maternal care that’s noteworthy in the animal kingdom. In fact, one of Dantzer’s picks for “animal super mom” is the Caecilian.

Mothers of some worm-like amphibians called Caecilians literally give a piece of themselves, by allowing their young to eat their flesh.

“Caecilians are these weird animals that look like snakes — they’re legless — but they’re actually amphibians,” he explains. They live underground, usually in rainforests, and aren’t seen that often, but when they are born, they have sharp tiny teeth on the front of their mouth. “When the mom is brooding her offspring, she produces this lipid-rich skin and her offspring use their little teeth to bite into the skin, rip it off and eat it.” She then re-grows her skin every three days to keep feeding them until they’re grown.

“I think of that as a super mom,” he says with a laugh.

Of course, even within species, maternal instinct varies. Just like with humans, some moms are simply more devoted to their babies than are others.

For example, at his lab, Dantzer studies maternal care in red squirrels. In order to measure a mother’s “attentiveness,” researchers will sometimes remove a mother’s babies from her nest and place them on the other side of the enclosure. They will then measure how long it takes the mom to bring each pup back to the nest. “And in red squirrels, there is a huge amount of individual variation,” he says.

“Some moms, when we take the babies out of the nest temporarily, they immediately come back. [The moms] are aggressive, they charge at us or they try to make sure we don’t get their babies at all.”

“Other moms don’t really care.” Sometimes, babies aren’t brought back to the nest at all.

Of course, in the wild, being a bad mom won’t pay off in the end. As Danzer says, “It’s being selflessly devoted to your offspring that is the number one trait that is going to make a mother successful.” And that’s why species like orangutans, African elephants and even Caecilians simply stand out.