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January 9, 2015
Q. How do the milks we buy at the grocery store — fat-free, 3 percent, etc. — compare with milk from Mom and other mammals such as rhinos, naked mole-rats and hooded seals?
A. For the sake of science, Olav Oftedal of the Smithsonian Environmental Resources Center has milked bats, bears and hundreds of naked mole-rat queens, notes Susan Milius of Science News magazine. The mole rats were especially intriguing in that “unlike nearly every other mammal on earth, the burdens of reproduction and milk feeding of young are placed solely on a single queen and are not shared among the females of the colony” (Smithsonian Science). Amazingly, a colony's top female can give birth to more than 900 offspring in a lifetime, meeting their nursing needs “by producing about half of her body weight in milk each day!”
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