MOST mammals are lousy fathers. Those that don’t eat their young do little to
help in the birth apart from making encouraging noises. Djungarian hamsters
(Phodopus campbelli), though, are paws-on dads.
In the first published case of its kind, Canadian scientists have watched
Djungarian fathers help pull their babies from the birth canal, lick off the
birth membranes, open the baby’s airways, then share a snack of afterbirth with
the mother.
There have been observations of this in other species
(New Scientist, 12 December 1998, p 38).
But Katherine Wynne-Edwards and her colleagues at
Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario,…
