Burt's Blog

Hey Y’ALL! (there’s that Louisiana vocab again!).  It’s Toni here, and in this post I want to share some more about some cool research looking at our maternal care behaviors.  Last time, I told you about how us females are mouth brooders, which means we hold our babies inside our mouths for ~2 weeks until they’re fully developed and can swim out on their own. During this time, we can’t really eat, so we’re pretty much starving and lose lots of weight, all to keep our babies happy and healthy! – this is extreme maternal care at its best!  Since we’re pretty hungry, we swim up to the food dropped in our tanks but stop ourselves before eating it when we remember those little guys already in our mouths.  As the babies get bigger, they get heavier too and to keep ourselves from doing a nosedive to the bottom, some adjustments are made in our swim bladders to keep us swimming straight (but that’s a story for another time!).  Anyway, once the babies are grown, we open our mouths and they swim