As the great Yondu once said, ‘he might be your father boy,  but he ain’t your daddy.’ Humans adopt other humans sometimes, taking in those we’re not genetically related to.

And that’s a great thing to do! But in the animal kingdom,  things start to get weird.

Like, inter-species adoptions,  or ones where it’s not really wanted by at least one participant. So from lions to monkeys, let’s look at the weirdest cases of adoption in the animal kingdom. [♪ INTRO] Ever done that thing where  you’ve picked something up and then you completely  forgot why it’s in your hand? Well, don’t feel too embarrassed – some  animals do that too. …With each other.

First on our list, eagles of the genus  Halieatus have been found to occasionally rear the chicks of other raptors  successfully to adulthood. Raptors referring to birds of prey,  not the villains of Jurassic Park. Researchers were monitoring a nest of White-tailed sea eagles in the Czech Republic.

To their surprise, they also found  a healthy common buzzard chick. And a month or so later, that chick had actually fledged earlier than its giant adoptive siblings. Checking the literature, the  researchers found several other cases of this happening, including ones where  the buzzards fledged successfully.

In bald eagles, there are multiple  records of similar events happening with red-tailed hawks, and  even a seagull in one case. So what gives? The scientists believe that the eagle  parents snatch other large bird chicks from nests as food for their own young.

They regularly do so with herons,  as well as buzzard chicks – dead or alive, at different ages. But when the eagles got the various  chicks back to the nest alive, they sort of… forgot they were there for eating. Eagles are solitary nesting species  and don’t have great social skills, so it’s been suggested that the eagles were very poor at actually recognizing their own young.

So they thought the stolen  chicks were their own offspring, not … takeout going bad in the fridge. Some researchers have even taken  advantage of this phenomenon. Some European conservation programs  have used raptors as foster parents to raise rare Spanish Imperial  Eagles and Lesser Spotted Eagles.

So a happy ending to get the ball rolling! Eagles aren’t the only ones coming  home with extra family members, though. Next on our list are eastern screech owls.

An 11 year project in Texas looking at  both species found their worlds colliding when the researchers found live blind snakes in the owl nests after the chicks had fledged. At first they thought the snakes  might have climbed in by mistake, since they’re known to climb the rough  bark of oak trees in search of ants. But then they actually recorded the adult  screech owls bringing the live snakes back to the nests, and the  snakes being alive the next day.

Screech owls normally kill prey before  they ever bring it back to the nest. And when the team surveyed the  nests, they found almost 20% of the 77 study nests housed one  or more live blind snakes. So it did actually seem that  this might be a deliberate act, and wasn’t just random chance.

But as is often asked in science: why? Well, it seemed the whole thing  was a win-win for both parties. Seems like the snakes were snacking  on unwanted insects in the nest, even eating so well that one  female snake was able to reproduce.

As for the owls, owlets raised in nests with  blind snakes had better survival rates – fly larvae can parasitize and kill baby owls. The chicks also had faster growth rates than those without the snakes when  scientists compared the two, leading to higher overall  breeding success for the parents. It’s hard to say how much the  owls know what they’re doing, as we can’t just like ask them,  but it’s suggested this may well be a deliberate behavior by the owls to  keep nests clean and chicks healthy.

To go from the air to the sea for our  next entry, in 2014 an unusual case was seen by scientists monitoring the  bottlenose dolphins in French Polynesia. One, a mother had two calves. Already uncommon.

And two, one of them was actually  a melon-headed whale calf, barely a month old if that. The researchers don’t know  how exactly the baby whale wound up with his foster mother, but  he really took to dolphin life quickly. For four years he was raised in the  pod, socialized with the other dolphins, was seen to engage in dolphin-y behaviors like breaching and even bullied his adoptive  sibling out of nursing sometimes.

After 2018 the little whale wasn’t seen anymore, so his eventual fate was unknown, but it  does seem he got a solid start in life. The why of the adoption is hard to say. One suggestion was that the inexperience  of the mother may have lead her to make unusual decisions; her natural calf actually went missing in the observation period too.

On top of that, she was also noted as  a very curious and sociable individual, often approaching and interacting  with the scientists on dives. So it could be that a lack  of knowledge and her uniquely friendly personality lead her to  take in the little whale calf. After the adoptee was no longer seen,  the mom had a second natural calf.

So fingers crossed they grew up ok  and didn’t think they were a whale. Now before we get to the rest of the list, all science needs funding,  so let’s go to a quick break. Thank you to Planet Wild for  supporting today’s SciShow video!

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There’s already been a lot of surprises on  this list, but this one might take the cake. Lions don’t get along especially  well with … well, anyone. But especially not with other carnivores.

So when a lioness in India’s Gir  forest was seen with a leopard cub, it was quite a shock for the researchers. Other studies looking at relationships  between lions and leopards have found lions are way more likely  to kill leopards than raise them. In fact, in one study they  were found to be responsible for up to 20% of deaths in both cubs and adults.

Similar behaviors had been witnessed  by researchers in the Gir forest. But our lioness wasn’t playing that game. Rather, she treated the  leopard like one of her own, alongside her three natural cubs.

She allowed it to suckle and feed from  kills, and the cub happily played with its giant adoptive siblings for as  long as the researchers observed them. So once again, the why. Well, for a start, Asiatic lions are  less social than their African cousins, so there’s less chance of the cub being  killed by the lioness’s pride-mates.

And importantly, lions and  leopards belong to the same genus, so there’s likely some overlap  in signals and behaviors that may have led the mother lioness to  think the leopard was another lion cub. It was also her first litter that made  it more than a few days, so once again it could be the lioness’s inexperience that  caused her to scoop up the extra cub. This also isn’t the first time it’s happened,  and in Tanzania a similar but far shorter and less well documented case of a  lioness and a leopard was spotted in 2017.

A lioness in Kenya was even seen  to adopt oryx calves in the 2000’s, but this case never underwent  full scientific scrutiny. For the Gir leopard cub,  sadly, things were not to be. A few weeks after the first observation,  it was found dead by a waterhole.

Autopsy found the cause to be a congenital hernia, so he probably never had much chance. But, for his short time on earth, the little leopard got to think  he was the king of beasts. For number 5, we head to Panama’s Jicarón Island.

A long running study was already in  place there after it was found that the white-faced capuchins on the  island were seen to use tools, which is always catnip for scientists. But then the scientists saw one  of the subadult male capuchins doing something quite weird:  carrying a baby howler monkey. The same male was then also seen to carry  around 3 more howler babies over the next few days, taking them around with  him until they presumably all perished.

Then, after a pause of about 5 months,  the rest of the boys joined in too. Several other young males joined in  with the howler carrying, sometimes even swapping the babies - who  were often trying to escape. Hard to blame them.

The group started taking  incredibly young babies too, even repelling the adult howlers  trying to save their young. So less adoption and more abduction. And this is a real problem for the howlers.

They’re already a small,  isolated island population, and none of the babies are  believed to survive being taken. Something that makes the ‘why’  of this case hard to answer is the fact the perpetrators were all male. Male capuchins play a limited role in parenting, so it’s probably not misplaced motherly instinct.

Rather, the best suggestion the researchers could come up with was, well … boredom. No, really. Jicarón Island has no  predators or competitors for the capuchins, and an abundance of food for them.

It’s believed this may lead to understimulation, a lot of free time and essentially  the evolution of boredom. And the young males seen to  carry the babies are the ones most often innovating new behaviors  to alleviate that boredom. So… howler monkey baby dolls!

Apparently. Luckily, not all primates  are such bad foster parents. We are great at it!

And I’m not even talking  about adopting our own kind. We have a lot of species  we’ve adopted over the years, if you count everything we’ve kept in a zoo, but for this entry we’re concerned  mainly with wolves … or dogs. Or the wolves we turned into dogs.

How humans did this is a bit  of a point of contention, since they very rudely didn’t leave notes for us. Some sorry excuse like “writing didn’t exist yet.” Originally, it was suggested that  wolves came to human settlements to scavenge scraps, and became progressively used to people until tameness and domestication ensued. But newer theories refute this  and suggest something different: that we essentially started adopting  wolf pups to raise ourselves.

This is corroborated by indigenous  peoples around the world. Indigenous Americans were seen to  play with wolf pups at their dens, and Aboriginal people in Australia do the same thing to tame dingoes for their camps. There’s only a short period  during which wolf pups can become socialized to humans,  so for domestication to occur, it seems like humans would have  had to target pups around that age.

But the two theories of domestication  aren’t mutually exclusive. It could have started with  adoption, resulting in tame, semi-wild wolves having their own  pups progressively closer to camp. Eventually they could have just  moved into human settlements and started breeding there,  and proper domestication began.

For the why? Security, hunting partnerships and, as many of us experience today, companionship. Lastly, we must turn to the  shady world of organized crime.

Because our final example is someone  being forced to rear someone else’s young. In this case, great spotted cuckoos forcing  magpies and crows to rear their chicks. Cuckoos are pretty famous nest-stealers, so you might be wondering what’s different.

Well, magpies are pretty bright, and  nest predators themselves as well. So you’d think they wouldn’t fall for  seeing the wrong egg in their nest. And it seems like they don’t - so the  cuckoos make them an offer they can’t refuse.

Rear our chicks… or we smash up your nest. When scientists removed the cuckoo eggs  from magpie nests as an experiment, they found the cuckoos actually  returned to destroy the nest. They believed this provided an incentive  for the magpies to rear the chicks, by imposing severe costs if you don’t comply.

But it’s worth noting unlike some other cuckoos, great spotted chicks don’t roll  the eggs or hatchlings out. They do hog the food as expected, but  the magpie chicks normally survive. And like any good mafia boss,  they even sweeten the deal.

The cuckoo chicks excrete a smelly  material when a predator visits the nest to put them off, and this protects  the magpie chicks as well. In areas of high predation, it’s even  beneficial to have a cuckoo chick in the nest. It’s basically a mob protection racket and there, like, actually is protection if you pay up!

So it seems sometimes, crime does pay. So there you have it – our list of the  weirdest adoptions in the animal kingdom. Sometimes it works out… sometimes not so much.

But what’s incredible is the behavioral  flexibility at work in all these animals. We get to learn about something we  never thought they would be able to do! And also, mafia birds.

We also  get to learn about mafia birds. [♪ OUTRO]