How many baby Brants’s whistling rats are in a litter?
A Brants’s whistling rat (Parotomys brantsii) usually gives birth to around 2 babies.With 3 litters per year, that sums up to a yearly offspring of 6 babies.
Each of those little ones spend around 37 days as a fetus before they are released into the wild. Upon birth, they weight 84 grams (0.19 lbs) and measure 7.8 cm (0′ 4″). They are a member of the Muridae family (genus: Parotomys). An adult Brants’s whistling rat grows up to a size of 51.7 cm (1′ 9″).
To have a reference: Humans obviously usually have a litter size of one ;). Their babies are in the womb of their mother for 280 days (40 weeks) and reach an average size of 1.65m (5′ 5″). They weight in at 62 kg (137 lbs), which is obviously highly individual, and reach an average age of 75 years.
Brants’s whistling rat or Brants’ whistling rat (Parotomys brantsii) is one of two species of murid rodent in the genus Parotomys. It is found in Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa where its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical dry shrubland and pastureland. It was first described in 1834 by the Scottish zoologist Andrew Smith who named it in honour of the Dutch zoologist and author Anton Brants.
Other animals of the family Muridae
Brants’s whistling rat is a member of the Muridae, as are these animals:
- Balochistan gerbil with 3 babies per pregnancy
- Texas mouse with 3 babies per pregnancy
- Kemp’s grass mouse weighting only 26 grams
- Dolorous grass mouse with 3 babies per pregnancy
- Masked white-tailed rat with 3 babies per pregnancy
- Tawny deer mouse with 2 babies per pregnancy
- Unalaska collared lemming with 2 babies per pregnancy
- Townsend’s vole with 5 babies per pregnancy
- Günther’s vole with 6 babies per pregnancy
- Lesser small-toothed rat raching a size of 15.8 cm (0′ 7″)
Animals that share a litter size with Brants’s whistling rat
Those animals also give birth to 2 babies at once:
- Northern yellow bat
- Eastern chestnut mouse
- Mountain ground squirrel
- Target rat
- Peters’s musk shrew
- Jaguarundi
- Greater bamboo bat
- Red acouchi
- Short-tailed chinchilla
- Soft-spined Atlantic spiny rat
Animals with the same weight as a Brants’s whistling rat
What other animals weight around 129 grams (0.28 lbs)?
- Edible dormouse weighting 128 grams
- New Caledonia flying fox weighting 151 grams
- Fraternal hill rat weighting 130 grams
- Woolly giant rat weighting 116 grams
- Red-cheeked flying squirrel weighting 118 grams
- Black-tailed gerbil weighting 123 grams
- Red spiny rat weighting 150 grams
- Giant kangaroo rat weighting 114 grams
- Greater Egyptian jerboa weighting 138 grams
- Whiskered flying squirrel weighting 108 grams