How many baby Lesser mole-rats are in a litter?
A Lesser mole-rat (Nannospalax leucodon) usually gives birth to around 3 babies.With 1 litters per year, that sums up to a yearly offspring of 3 babies.
Each of those little ones spend around 29 days as a fetus before they are released into the wild. Upon birth, they weight 5 grams (0.01 lbs) and measure 3.8 cm (0′ 2″). They are a member of the Muridae family (genus: Nannospalax). An adult Lesser mole-rat grows up to a size of 50 cm (1′ 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 lesser mole-rat (Spalax leucodon) is a species of rodent in the family Spalacidae found in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, Israel, Turkey, Iran and Ukraine. There have been suggestions that its taxonomic position should change in the light of new scientific information. Modern authors tend to separate this and some closely related mole rat species from other Spalax species by classifying them into a separate genus named Nannospalax. A cariological study showed that Nannospalax leucodon is a superspecies consisting of several cariologically distinct cryptic species. According to this definition there are four separate cariological forms in the Carpathian Basin, one of them endangered and another one vulnerable while insufficient data are available to evaluate the conservation status of the other two forms.
Other animals of the family Muridae
Lesser mole-rat is a member of the Muridae, as are these animals:
- False canyon mouse raching a size of 8.4 cm (0′ 4″)
- Arizona cotton rat weighting only 198 grams
- Peruvian Oldfield mouse weighting only 77 grams
- Malayan mountain spiny rat with 2 babies per pregnancy
- Black-tailed mosaic-tailed rat with 2 babies per pregnancy
- Tawitawi forest rat raching a size of 19 cm (0′ 8″)
- Hylaeamys yunganus weighting only 60 grams
- Typical striped grass mouse with 4 babies per pregnancy
- Phillips’s gerbil weighting only 127 grams
- Oecomys phaeotis weighting only 73 grams
Animals that share a litter size with Lesser mole-rat
Those animals also give birth to 3 babies at once:
- Dwarf fat-tailed jerboa
- Middle East blind mole-rat
- Sado mole
- Greater hedgehog tenrec
- Heath mouse
- Pygmy hog
- Delany’s mouse
- European wildcat
- Tibetan sand fox
- Masked white-tailed rat
Animals that get as old as a Lesser mole-rat
Other animals that usually reach the age of 4.5 years:
- Derby’s woolly opossum with 5 years
- Greater cane rat with 4.25 years
- Gray tree rat with 3.75 years
- Hispid cotton rat with 5.17 years
- Yellow-faced pocket gopher with 4.67 years
- Cairo spiny mouse with 5 years
- Southern grasshopper mouse with 4.58 years
- White-bellied duiker with 5.25 years
- Otter civet with 5 years
- Bank vole with 4.83 years
Animals with the same weight as a Lesser mole-rat
What other animals weight around 189 grams (0.42 lbs)?
- Lesser mole-rat weighting 188 grams
- Dassie rat weighting 224 grams
- Haig’s tuco-tuco weighting 164 grams
- Mountain spiny rat weighting 159 grams
- Knox Jones’s pocket gopher weighting 172 grams
- Collared tuco-tuco weighting 210 grams
- Dusky bushbaby weighting 213 grams
- American red squirrel weighting 200 grams
- Long-haired rat weighting 221 grams
- Tropical ground squirrel weighting 155 grams