Reproduction
The breeding season lasts from April to November, when rain is plentiful. Receptive individuals initially signal to each other by drumming on the floors of their burrows with their hind legs. After they have approached other, they lock their large incisor teeth together, until the female raises her tail and calls out prior to copulation.
Gestation lasts for about two months, and results in the birth of a litter of up to six young, with three being typical. The young are initially blind and weigh 27 to 52 grams (0.95 to 1.8 oz). They open their eyes at seven days, begin to take solid food at twelve days, and are fully weaned by the end of their first month. Litter mates frequently spar with one another, and disperse to establish their own burrow systems after around two months, by which time they have already reached nearly half the adult body weight. They live for over six years.
Read more about this topic: Cape Dune Mole Rat
Famous quotes containing the word reproduction:
“It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“Although Samuel had a depraved imagination—perhaps even because of this—love, for him, was less a matter of the senses than of the intellect. It was, above all, admiration and appetite for beauty; he considered reproduction a flaw of love, and pregnancy a form of insanity. He wrote on one occasion: “Angels are hermaphrodite and sterile.””
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“An original is a creation
motivated by desire.
Any reproduction of an original
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It is marvelous that we are
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To create is divine, to reproduce
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—Man Ray (1890–1976)