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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lycanthrope" data-source="post: 495983" data-attributes="member: 562"><p>Some people would call snapping turtles terrible mothers because they bury the eggs and walk away. That’s the wrong scorecard. A mother’s evolutionary job is not to hover. It is to get genes into the next generation. Snapping turtles have been doing that for about 70 million years. Anatomically modern humans have been around for about 300,000. The turtles are not the rookies here. What the female actually invests: She hauls her heavy body over land, sometimes across roads, to pick a nest site. That choice sets the temperature of the eggs, which sets the sex of the babies. She digs with her hind legs, sometimes wetting the soil so she can work it. She lays a big clutch—often 20 to 45 eggs—packs them with yolk, covers the hole, and leaves.Then she lives a long time and does it again.Most nests get raided. Raccoons and foxes are very good at this. So she does not waste years sitting on a hole that is statistically likely to be empty in 24 hours. She puts the energy into more eggs, a better starting package, and another breeding season. Hatchlings come out ready. They dig, they head downhill toward water, and they are on their own. That is the design.No bedtime stories. No nest-guarding. Just a strategy that outlasted the non-avian dinosaurs.If the purpose of a mother is the continuation of the line, snapping turtles have been extremely good at the job. They just refuse to perform it in a way that looks like a greeting card.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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