动物世界不同寻常的兄弟情

Host: And let’s end this week’s series on siblings by expanding it to some other kinds of family, families in the animal’s kingdom. Here is NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin.

Selena Simmons-Duffin,correspondent: Some animal’s sibling relationships look familiar, like African elephants who are born one at a time and whose older sisiters baby-sit them when their mother is gone. Others are more unusual.

Mr. Steve Jenkins: 9-banded armadillo（九纹犰狳） are almost always born in an identical quadruplet.

Selena Simmons-Duffin: That’s Steve Jenkins. He wrote a children’s book about animal siblings. He says naked mole rats（裸滨鼠） can have hundreds of siblings, all from one mother called the queen.

Some of these relationships are helpful. Tiny, tiny European shrew（鼩鼱） siblings move in a caravan so they don’t get lost.

Mr. Steve Jenkins: Each shrew holds on to the shrew in front with its teeth.

Selena Simmons-Duffin: I went to the National Zoo in Washington,D.C. to meet another group of helpful siblings. They are 6 brothers, Asian small-clawed otters （亚洲小爪水獭）. They were pretty noisy.

Ms. Erika Bauer: That’s a please, I want some fish noisy, yeah..

Selena Simmons-Duffin: That’s biologist Erika Bauer. She told me the otter brothers spend almost all the time together. They sleep in a big pile and work together on projects.

Ms. Erika Bauer: They pull the grasses down, and carry it around. They look like, they are very industrious and they build nests together aimed for sleeping.

Selena Simmons-Duffin: Peregrine Falcon(游隼) siblings also work together. They use each other as a target practice when they are learning to hunt diving at  each other at over 100 miles an hour.

Bird curator Dan Boritt took us to see the cattle egrets(牛背鹭) which illustrate the darker side of siblinghood.

Mr. Dan Boritt: I mean, siblicide is kind of a downer.

Selena Simmons-Duffin: Cattle egrets’ parents often can’t provide for all of their young so…

Mr. Dan Boritt: One of the chicks as it gets stronger will actually kill its sibling and throw it out of the nest so that they are the recipient of all the resources

Selena Simmons-Duffin: yeah, kind of a downer.

Mr. Dan Boritt: Even though it sounds quite cruel to us, if you had to split your limited resources amongst two, three, four chicks, chances are none of those would survive, so you are “putting all your eggs in one basket” (idiom), pardon the pun.

Selena Simmons-Duffin: OK, there is one more species we had to check out, the lions. Lions live in family groups called prides. At the National Zoo, there were 7 new lion cubs just a few weeks old. We couldn’t visit them since they are getting all the shots, but I got the rundown from expert Craig Saffoe

Mr. Craig Saffoe: They all play together, they wrestle and everybody is biting each other’s tails. They are just, I mean, I'm not a big fan of the "C" word, but they are really, really cute.

Selena Simmons-Duffin: So we can’t exactly graft our human stories of love and bickering（争吵）onto these animal species. But think of these as extreme metaphors, the next time you build a metaphorical nest with your sibling, or feel like pushing them out of one.

Selena Simmons-Duffin, NPR News.

Host: And you will find all of our stories about brothers and sisters on our Web site. You can also playing online match game of famous people and their lesser-known(几乎不为人知的) siblings. Plus NPR music has a mix of songs from sibling acts. That’s all at NPR.org