In the middle of the night in a humid coastal rainforest, a litter of pink, hairless babies snuggle with their mother. They stir and squeak for milk, their mother obliges, and they are sated. But these are no puppies or cubs. They are snake-shaped amphibians, far closer to frogs than foxes.
These ringed caecilian moms feed their hatchlings a kind of “milk” brewed in the reproductive tract, researchers report in the March 8 Science. The long, cylindrical creatures are the first egg-laying amphibians known to feed hatchlings this way. The discovery suggests the evolution of parental care across animal life is more diverse than researchers thought.
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