Mouthbrooding fish under stress may sometimes resort to cannibalism and eat their young. Scientists' discovery of the behavior was 'a complete accident.'
Few sights in nature are more heartwarming than that of a mother caring for her young — unless that nurturing act ends with an episode of cannibalism.
Researchers from Central Michigan University discovered the gruesome behavior while studying schools of Astatotilapia burtoni, a species of African freshwater cichlid, in their lab. In a study published Nov. 9 in the journal Biology Letters , the scientists reported that in some instances, ravenous A. burtoni mothers swallow some of their young, turning to filial cannibalism as an alternative to starvation.
"We realized that one of the mothers wasn't holding all of her offspring," Dijkstra said."We figured that she probably ate them. There's actually quite a bit of literature out there about cannibalization. It's very common in a lot of animal species."The researchers said it likely is because females become desperate for nutrients while they're mouthbrooding.
Mouthbrooding also can be a high-stress time for female cichlids, and a prior study of A. burtoni, published in 2020 in the open-access journal Genes, Brain and Behavior , found that high-stress environments can lead mouthbrooding females to cannibalism. In the new study, the authors discovered that some mouthbrooding mothers showed signs of liver damage, with levels of DNA damage that were 24% higher than in non-brooding females.
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