My question is not which animals have the largest baby. That’s a blue whale.
Instead, I’d like to know which baby animals are the largest at birth compared to the size of their mother. If we include birds, that’d be baby minus the shell.
Some very large animals like polar and panda bears and red kangaroos have really small newborns, so Mom’s size doesn’t seem to strictly determine the infant’s. So it’d be interesting if the largest baby compared to mother is a big animal or a small one.
I’m going to go with the kiwi, and say that “egg minus shell” is a meaningless distinction because the baby birds grow to completely full the shell before hatching anyway.
On the mammalian side, baby giraffes are 1/10th the size of their mothers. By way of comparison, human babies are 1/22.
Concur - in fact, this is what I was coming in to say.
My friend Christa is a petite little hundred pound lady who bore twin boys (vaginally) last year.
What was their combined weight? Otherwise that doesn’t tell us much.
Unless they came out simultaneously.
They was fucking huge!
Yeah, I don’t know things like baby’s weights. But their size shocked everyone. Little Christa was telling everyone that she was pregnant, but she was a wisp of a gal. A month later she told everyone that ultrasound showed she was carrying twins. We all assumed she was psycho.
Months later she was barely showing. Then outa nowhere she got a belly. She worked (Bartending) until her water broke and returned to work shortly after delivering twins. I ordered a beer and she told me, “just a sec, gotta go pump”.
I’m telling you, the afterbirth was nine and a half pounds!
I used to practice OB, and was involved in a few twin deliveries. This does NOT happen. Otherwise there’d be no way for one twin to determine superiority over the other.
The paradoxical frog beats anything you could think of (unless, of course, you regularly imagine animals violating the laws of hysics)
For mammals, possibly some species of sengi (aka. elephant shrew, aka. macroscelididae)?
I used to work with one species, and their baby was comparatively huge at birth, and very precocious.
This depressing '70s study gives an average adult weight of 49.2g for adults and 10g for newborns for Elephantulus intufi, which is about 20% per baby (and they often have twins!)
They’re ridiculously cute as well.
If you go all the way to the smallest animal, amoebas reproduce via binary fission so after ‘birth’ the mother and child are of equal size…
Amoebae are not animals.
