Reproduction
During the summer mating season, both sexes drum on the sides of their tunnels with their hind feet, using a different signal than when warning off potential intruders at other times of the year. The drumming is loud enough to be heard above ground at a distance of up to 10 metres (33 ft) away. Once the male finds a partner, courtship and mating are brief, and interspersed with bouts of grooming.
Gestation lasts 44 to 48 days, and a litter of three to ten young are born between August and December. The young are born hairless and blind, weighing only 5 to 12 grams (0.18 to 0.42 oz), and 3 to 4 centimetres (1.2 to 1.6 in) in length. The fur begins to grow on day seven, and the eyes open on day nine. The young grow rapidly, and begin to take solid food around day seventeen, being fully weaned at four weeks of age. By five weeks, siblings begin to show aggression towards one another, and they leave to establish their own burrows at around seven weeks.
Cape mole rats reach sexual maturity at eighteen months of age, and live up to five years.
Read more about this topic: Cape Mole Rat
Famous quotes containing the word reproduction:
“The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“The atmosphere parents wish to create when talking with children about birth and reproduction is warm, honest, and reassuring, one that tells children they are free to ask questions as often as they need to, and you will answer them as lovingly as you know how.”
—Joanna Cole (20th century)
“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)