As you may know, my new job is breeding up mice for our lab’s experiments. While from my job’s perspective a mom mouse who eats her new litter of babies is a pain in the ass for me who’s trying to breed up a scientific cohort, it does make perfect sense. If Mom’s under stress if she eats her litter she’ll quickly start to ovulate again meaning her next litter is more likely to survive.
Of course when it comes to my genetically altered charges sometimes this “Stress” factor has a bit of a hair trigger. Still in normal mice this makes perfect sense.
More on that here:
