indicativeof-sideways-escalation:gentlesharks:fenm-universe:gentlesharks:everyone’s freaking out abo
indicativeof-sideways-escalation:gentlesharks:fenm-universe:gentlesharks:everyone’s freaking out about this pregnant shark from my last post so here she is. lets hear it for this pregnant shark Aww, mama shark! I hope she has lots of healthy baby sharks! (-:baby sharks already have razor sharp teeth even while in the womb. the pups eat each other while inside the mother and usually only 1 comes out aliveNot all sharks! This isn’t even common! In fact it is more common for a momma shark to have more than one pup if she is viviparous(live-birthing, vs oviparous, egg-laying). The behavior you describe can arise for a couple of reasons.First of all: poor resources.When the mother herself is poorly nourished, the pups begin to starve too. If she has enough resources to feed both herself and the pups inside her, there is little need for those pups to eat each other.Another reason involves intraspecific selection. For some species that are polyandrous, the female will have several offspring with different fathers. The pups within that mother may all have different fathers, and are less incentivized to refrain from cannibalism. In fact, the pup with the strongest father can gather extra resources for themself, and eat some of its littermates. Good genes give the pup a good start in life, which gives it an advantage when it leaves the warm safety of its mother to enter the cold, unforgiving world of the open ocean. Cannibalism ensures that the mother will give resources to the strongest pup(s), the one that won ‘most likely to succeed and make more batches of little cartilaginous fish babies’ in the third trimester. The sharks that most often have viviparous, utero-cannibalistic young are sharks that live in the open ocean, where food is scarce and there’s no place to hide for a young little shark pup. -- source link
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