Moms everywhere will tell you all about the excruciating labor pains that come along with delivering a baby, but in the animal kingdom, many newborns are significantly larger than their human counterparts.
Blue whales give birth to the largest newborns in the world. Their calves can weigh up to a thousand kilograms and match the size of a small car. After indulging on its mother’s nutrient-rich milk, a blue whale calf grows so quickly that it puts on nearly 90 kilograms each day.
On land, elephants enjoy the first-place prize for birthing the largest newborns. Newborn elephant calves weigh, on average, approximately 105 kilograms. While that’s not much when compared to a blue whale, it’s certainly no laughing matter when compared to that of a human baby.
Giraffes and white rhinos take second and third place for land animals, with the former delivering 75-kilogram calves and the latter delivering up to 64-kilogram calves.
The circumstances become somewhat more alarming when you take into consideration the baby’s size compared to the mother. Shingleback lizards, for example, give birth to live twins that weigh almost one-third that of the mother. A close runner-up are bats, which deliver babies up to one-quarter of their size.
So yes, childbirth is no laughing matter for humans, but some animals just plain have it much worse.
