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Filial cannibalism occurs when an adult individual of a species consumes all or part of the young of its own species or immediate offspring.Filial cannibalism occurs in many species ranging from mammals to insects, and is especially prevalent in various types of fish species with males that engage in egg guardianship. [1]
Desert Spider, Stegodyphus lineatus, one of the best-described species that participates in matriphagy Matriphagy is the consumption of the mother by her offspring. [1] [2] The behavior generally takes place within the first few weeks of life and has been documented in some species of insects, nematode worms, pseudoscorpions, and other arachnids as well as in caecilian amphibians.
Filial cannibalism is a specific type of size-structured cannibalism in which adults eat their own offspring. [34] Although most often thought of as parents eating live young, filial cannibalism includes parental consumption of stillborn infants and miscarried fetuses as well as infertile and still-incubating eggs.
Some animals starve to death shortly after birthing their young while others are eaten by their own young -- but these mothers make the ultimate sacrifice. Click through for 10 animal mothers that ...
A couple who lived nearby later accidentally revealed that they had murdered and eaten their own son, avoiding suspicions about his disappearance by claiming that he had gone to the countryside. [26] Another woman later remembered how she had once discovered "the body of a fifteen-year-old girl stowed under the stairwell of an apartment block.
Infants and young children would often be killed, roasted, and eaten by their mother and sometimes also fed to siblings, usually during times of famine. In non-filial cases when a child was "well-fed" and in the absence of its mother sometimes a man or the whole community would kill and consume the child. [57] [58]
Elizabeth Báthory allegedly forced some of her servants to eat their own flesh in the early 17th century. [13] During the violence that followed the 1991 Haitian coup d'état, victims sometimes had to eat their own hacked-off body parts. [14] In the 1990s, young people in Uganda were forced to eat their own ears. [15]
Maternal placentophagy is defined as "a mother’s ingestion of her own placenta postpartum, in any form, at any time". [1] Of the more than 4000 species of placental mammals, most, including herbivores, regularly engage in maternal placentophagy, thought to be an instinct to hide any trace of childbirth from predators in the wild.