Losing a newborn baby is the most common frustration in ARK: you waited for the hatch, you filled the trough, you went to bed — and by morning it's gone.
That isn't bad luck. It's arithmetic: a baby eats much faster than an adult, and the trough that looks full lasts far less than you'd think.
A newborn has a tiny stomach and a very high consumption rate. In the first hours it eats constantly, and the rate only drops as it grows. The critical window is the first two or three hours after hatching: survive those and the rest is calmer.
The second reason is that food in a trough isn't consumed as one pool: every baby draws from it independently. Four babies on the same trough empty it in a quarter of the time one would take.
The calculation that matters is:
A common mistake is filling the trough with cooked meat because "it takes less space". Raw meat carries more nutrition per unit, so for the same slots it lasts longer.
The weak point in all of this is that you have to remember it yourself, and you have to be at the game.
ArkHive reads your server's real data and works out how long until each trough runs dry, accounting for how many babies are drawing from it. When the margin gets thin a notification reaches your phone, even while you're offline — with the time you have left, not a generic alert after the fact.
It's the difference between finding the problem in the morning and being told while there's still time to fix it.