Moms are heroes in any species. In many, they do not only the birthing and nursing, but also the hunting and fighting and protecting. And while human mothers certainly deserve all of the flowers and phone calls they get on Mother's Day, we dare say that there are other species where motherhood is an even more trying and/or terrifying ordeal. For instance ...

5 Tasmanian Devil Moms Can't Feed 90 Percent of Their Babies (by Design)

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Even if you only know Tasmanian devils from the Warner Bros. cartoons, you can guess that their family life isn't a goddamned Norman Rockwell painting. Pound for pound, Tasmanian devils have the strongest mammalian bite in the world. They eat everything down to the bones, and then they eat the bones ... and then the clothes and shoes. They're mean, gluttonous little cusses who will chew through metal if the mood strikes them.

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They get their training in animal badassery early, as their very first act of life is basically a Thunderdome death match that fewer than one in 10 will survive. The problem is that the mother will give birth to as many as 50 pups ... but she only has four lactation dispensaries (aka boobs) with which to feed them.

And Tasmanian devils don't share for shit. Because there are only four milk spigots, only four pups will survive. Plain and simple. As soon as they're born, there's a race to see who gets one of mommy's feeding nozzles. Whoever makes it there first and can hold on wins.

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The remaining 46 starve to death within hours.

In short, nature goes through the trouble of creating 50 squirming newborns and then lets 92 percent of them die pretty much immediately for no reason other than to drive home the point that sharing is for losers.