How many baby Common mole-rats are in a litter?
A Common mole-rat (Cryptomys hottentotus) usually gives birth to around 2 babies.With 2 litters per year, that sums up to a yearly offspring of 4 babies.
Each of those little ones spend around 84 days as a fetus before they are released into the wild. Upon birth, they weight 8 grams (0.02 lbs) and measure 2.2 cm (0′ 1″). They are a member of the Bathyergidae family (genus: Cryptomys). An adult Common mole-rat grows up to a size of 19.3 cm (0′ 8″).
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.
The common mole-rat, African mole-rat, or Hottentot mole-rat, (Cryptomys hottentotus) is a burrowing rodent found in Southern Africa, in particular in the Western Cape province of South Africa. It also occurs in Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. It is a species in the subfamily Bathyerginae.
Other animals of the family Bathyergidae
Common mole-rat is a member of the Bathyergidae, as are these animals:
- Damaraland mole-rat with 3 babies per pregnancy
- Naked mole-rat with 11 babies per pregnancy
- Mashona mole-rat with 1 babies per pregnancy
- Mechow’s mole-rat with 2 babies per pregnancy
- Ochre mole-rat with 3 babies per pregnancy
- Namaqua dune mole-rat with 3 babies per pregnancy
- Cape mole-rat with 5 babies per pregnancy
- Cape dune mole-rat with 2 babies per pregnancy
- Bocage’s mole-rat weighting only 93 grams
- Zambian mole-rat weighting only 76 grams
Animals that share a litter size with Common mole-rat
Those animals also give birth to 2 babies at once:
- Large treeshrew
- Black-headed marmoset
- Little desert pocket mouse
- African marsh rat
- White-sided jackrabbit
- Geoffroy’s tamarin
- Greenish yellow bat
- Clara’s echymipera
- Round-tailed muskrat
- Little pied bat
Animals with the same weight as a Common mole-rat
What other animals weight around 74 grams (0.16 lbs)?
- Woodland Oldfield mouse weighting 77 grams
- Argentine hocicudo weighting 67 grams
- Kalinowski’s Oldfield mouse weighting 77 grams
- Gansu pika weighting 69 grams
- Rhoads’s Oldfield mouse weighting 77 grams
- Ansell’s mole-rat weighting 85 grams
- Pink fairy armadillo weighting 86 grams
- Burrowing chinchilla mouse weighting 83 grams
- Spectacled dormouse weighting 68 grams
- Southern mole vole weighting 80 grams