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(#2) Spotted Hyenas Must Learn To Kill Or Be Killed
Spotted hyenas have to come out of the womb swinging. They're born with open eyes and sharp teeth, and their entire childhood revolves around battling their siblings to establish dominance. The weaker cubs almost always meet a certain death, even though hyena's only natural predators are in fact each other.
The fighting can become so brutal between cubs that adult hyenas sometimes try to separate their pups, who just begin fighting again as soon as they're left alone. These battles often go on for weeks, or until weaker cubs are fatally injured. And the weaker cubs who don't happen to die from their injuries are usually so abused that they are too terrified to leave their burrows when their mothers come home to feed them. So even these cubs eventually die of starvation in their borrows, alone.
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(#10) Baby Hippopotamuses Nearly Drown As Soon As They're Born
Baby hippos are born underwater without the ability to swim or breath. As a result, the immediate risk of suffocation is immense, and they have to rely on their mothers to dive down and pull them up to the surface where they can finally take their first breath.
A baby hippo must instantly learn how to swim and hold its breath underwater or it will either die of drowning or starvation, as baby hippos need to swim underwater to get milk from their mothers. Baby hippos also have a number of natural predators including lions, leopards, and crocs, but their biggest killer is dehydration - baby hippos don't have sweat glands so they can't stay out of the water for very long.
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(#11) Golden Eagle Chicks Are Essentially In The Hunger Games
Golden eagles rarely lay eggs, but when they do they have just one or two eggs per nest. And when these eggs hatch, the chicks enter into a Hunger Games-type competition for survival.
Most often, one egg will hatch before the other. This chick then ends up being fed before the other is born and grows much more quickly. When the second is finally born, is can never quite catch up to its older sibling. Because a firstborn chick is so much bigger and stronger, it usually wins fights for food, causing most second born chick to die from malnutrition. And if the younger chick doesn't happen to die right away, as soon as food becomes scarce it will be eaten by its older sibling. It's estimated that 80% of second-born golden eagles die this way.
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(#4) Baby Sea Turtles Make A Long, Treacherous Journey To The Sea
When baby sea turtles hatch, they're completely on their own and without protection from mom or dad. Once they break out of their eggs, they have to crawl out from under the sand and make a long, treacherous journey into the sea with only their instincts to guide them. These animals have no protection against the birds that often scoop them up for a quick meal. And if they're lucky enough to not get eaten by a bird, they still have to watch out for the crabs that'll try to pull them back underground to eat them alive. Sadly, only 1% of sea turtle hatchlings actually manage to survive into adulthood.
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(#1) Giraffes Have To Survive A Six-Foot Drop And Learn How To Walk In An Hour
Baby giraffes may seem fragile because of their thin bones and long necks, but the truth is that they're actually beasts of survival. A baby giraffe has to go to great lengths to survive - literally. Female giraffes give birth standing up, which means that their little ones have to fall over six feet down to the ground - they're basically thrown out of a first-floor window! Worse yet, they have to come out of the womb running - giraffes have lots of natural predators, so newborns have to learn how to stand, walk, and run all within an hour, or face imminent doom.
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(#6) Out Of All The Honey Bee Larvae, Only One Queen Can Survive
The odds are pretty bad when only one of your siblings can survive. This is the case for honey bee larvae vying to be royalty. Most honey bee larvae have nothing to worry about, but when a queen bee starts growing old, a new one needs to be crowned.
Worker bees (sterile females who produce honey and find food for their colony) select a few larvae and move them into a special area of the hive. These larvae are fed mass amounts of royal jelly, an ultra-nutritious food that helps them grow into fertile queens. Then, at a certain age, these future queens build cocoons and undergo metamorphosis in order to become adult bees. However, since there can only be one queen, whichever bee emerges from their cocoon first will sting the others to death before their metamorphosis is through. If more than one Queen emerges at the same time, they battle to the death. Only one can survive, and as soon as there is a victor, the worker bees kill the old queen and the new one immediately takes the throne.
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About This Tool
We are lucky to watch the life and growth of real wild animals in various nature documentaries. Most people are always attracted by cute and naive baby animals, but the truth of nature is more brutal than our imagination, baby animals have to accept the ultimate challenge of nature in the most fragile stage of life, that is, the first few weeks or months of their life.
Baby animals usually depend on their parents for their lives, the few weeks or months after birth are the most critical period in their lives. They need to learn to hunt and defend their enemies independently in a cruel nature. The random tool introduced 11 baby animals that have to go through brutal challenges to survive.
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