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Speaker 4: Oh Hey, hey, it's that hi, Hi, it's a lady
Speaker 4: from your mom's book. Club. Hi, the one who apologizes
Speaker 4: even when she brings cookies. Yeah, Hi, it's Ali Ward
Speaker 4: back with another episode of Oologies. Oh man, I never
Speaker 4: knew I needed this episode. Like we've had an episode
Speaker 4: about ornithology birds, but now we're gonna get to the heart,
Speaker 4: the heart of the matter. And by heart I mean
Speaker 4: butt and by butt I mean kloaca. So what is
Speaker 4: it kloaca? Well, as I've said before, it's kind of
Speaker 4: like the home button on an iPhone, like if Steve
Speaker 4: Jobs had designed an orifice, just a multipurpose little boop.
Speaker 4: It's good for sensual adult times, for egg laying and pooh.
Speaker 4: So today we're gonna be cracking wise about eggs. Oh,
Speaker 4: so many eggs, so many glorious eggs. What a wonder? Okay,
Speaker 4: but first, this podcast really quick would not exist without patrons.
Speaker 4: On patreon dot com slash ologies. You can support for
Speaker 4: a dollar in ap episode a dollar a month. Patrons
Speaker 4: get to hear what episodes are coming up next and
Speaker 4: submit questions for the ologists, and I say, your name
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Speaker 4: com has backpacks, caps, bikinis, shirts, there's totes, gifts, pins,
Speaker 4: all science themed. But if money's tight because the world
Speaker 4: is falling apart and it's on fire, that's okay. Rating
Speaker 4: and subscribing and reviewing keeps ologies up in the charts
Speaker 4: where other people can see it and say, what is
Speaker 4: this podcast that talks about slug dis and why does
Speaker 4: this lady call herself my dad? I read all of
Speaker 4: your reviews. I'm upfront about it, all right. I'm kind
Speaker 4: of like a concerned parent reading the diary that you
Speaker 4: left open on the counter, and so to prove it,
Speaker 4: just like I do every week, I shout out one reviewer,
Speaker 4: and this week I would like to think Beyonce two three,
Speaker 4: seven oh six. Maybe that's Beyonce. Perhaps it's a different
Speaker 4: beyond who says this podcast makes me want to make
Speaker 4: the world a better place. I love hearing all of
Speaker 4: these people who I would normally think of as existing
Speaker 4: on another plane and finding out that they're just people
Speaker 4: and I could be one of them too. I read
Speaker 4: that earlier today and literally started crying. So thank you
Speaker 4: Beyonce for that. Okay, let's get the shell back t
Speaker 4: it this excellent episode? Shall we? By the way, that
Speaker 4: is why I call myself here dad? Okay, So Why
Speaker 4: is it called oology? Why are there so many god
Speaker 4: dang oh's in this word? Okay comes from one guess, Yes,
Speaker 4: the Greek for ion, meaning egg, and it's a branch
Speaker 4: of ornithology that deals with eggs. I want to think
Speaker 4: that the oo in oology is just because the moos
Speaker 4: look like little eggies, but that's not true. Okay, So
Speaker 4: this interview, what a what a treat? Okay. I was
Speaker 4: in Chicago for a few days and I reached out
Speaker 4: to the wonderland that is the Field Museum via the
Speaker 4: Brain Scoops Emily Grassley, hey girl, and they hooked me up.
Speaker 4: So not only did they give me a quiet room
Speaker 4: to record the epidemiology episode with the errands of this
Speaker 4: podcast will kill You, but they were also like, yo,
Speaker 4: we got an egg dude for you. So Kate Golumbski,
Speaker 4: I owe you like ten puppies. Kate met me at
Speaker 4: the Field and she walked me through the ornithology lab. Whoa, hi,
Speaker 4: so many of you are up some steps.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: What I didn't realize also is that this museum is
Speaker 4: so big that our commute from one office to the other,
Speaker 4: that's a good time in to commute. I should have
Speaker 4: left a trailer breadcrumbs to the office of an expert
Speaker 4: in bird babies, this kind faced, bespectacled gentleman with thick
Speaker 4: salt and pepper hair and a desk piled with eggbooks
Speaker 4: and field notes. But it was a Friday afternoon at
Speaker 4: four pm, and I just hated to keep him from
Speaker 4: his weekend. So some of the questions and answers are
Speaker 4: super rapid, But then we had such a jolly time
Speaker 4: hanging out that afterwards he offered to give me a
Speaker 4: tour of the egg bunker, and hell yes, I took
Speaker 4: him up on that. So throughout the interview there are
Speaker 4: audio notes from that tour as we continued to just
Speaker 4: gab in the stacks. So this episode is just a
Speaker 4: feast of facts about speckley eggs and outlaw burders and
Speaker 4: falcon mysteries and vaults of delicate treasures and can you
Speaker 4: eat cookie dough? And modern research done with old artifacts,
Speaker 4: and there's some Easter bullshit and chicken hatching, even snake trivia.
Speaker 4: It's got it all, So buckle up, all right, let's
Speaker 4: settle our feathers and ready ourselves for the ornithological treasures
Speaker 4: of oologists. Doctor John Bates. Hi, I'm Ali Warren. Hi,
Speaker 4: nice to meet you. Thank you for talking about eggs
Speaker 4: with me. Are you technically an oologist? No?
Speaker 5: I am not?
Speaker 4: What not an oologist? He literally edited the book of eggs.
Speaker 4: It's called the Book of Eggs and his name is
Speaker 4: on the cover. Like, not an oologist. He studies bird eggs. Okay,
Speaker 4: I gotta breathe that. Okay, more on this situation a minute.
Speaker 4: But he is definitely an evolutionary biologist slash ornithologist and
Speaker 4: officially an associate curator of birds and head of the
Speaker 4: Life Sciences Division at the Field Museum in Chicago. Or
Speaker 4: what do you study about birds? Do you study particular
Speaker 4: like eggs of different species, feathers, beaks? Like, what's your bag?
Speaker 5: Well, I'm a curator and so we have one of
Speaker 5: the world's greatest collections of birds here in the museum,
Speaker 5: and so one of the things I've been interested in
Speaker 5: over the years is all aspects of ab and biology.
Speaker 5: But the egg part actually came about because we have
Speaker 5: an egg collection and I feel like it's my responsibility
Speaker 5: to know something about eggs.
Speaker 4: So after the interview at his desk, John took me
Speaker 4: down this labyrinth into the bowels of the museum, just
Speaker 4: stuffed with millions of scientific artifacts, like for real, actually
Speaker 4: millions of artifacts. What you see on displays at museums
Speaker 4: is this laughably small representation of their actual shit they
Speaker 4: have in files and drawers and boxes behind the scenes.
Speaker 4: So behind these scenes, we came upon a room labeled
Speaker 4: egg Collection, to which John had the keys.
Speaker 6: Wow, what this looks like a like a bank bunker,
Speaker 6: they REALOK, they do, yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 4: So how many specimens.
Speaker 5: From so probably about one hundred thousand eggs?
Speaker 4: But now, why do you say you're not an oologist
Speaker 4: even though you study verdegs?
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's because basically, I don't know if you could
Speaker 5: find anybody who had described themselves as an oologist anymore.
Speaker 5: It's a field that's it's an extinctology at some level,
Speaker 5: which is too bad. That's actually one of the things
Speaker 5: that we're interested in, some colleagues and I are interested in.
Speaker 5: We're actually working on a paper right now trying to
Speaker 5: encourage people to remember, and that is that there's these
Speaker 5: incredible collections of eggs around the world, and a lot
Speaker 5: of times they're pretty underutilized. People tend to forget they're there.
Speaker 5: So oology was really popular in the eighteen eighties into
Speaker 5: the nineteen twenties or so, and then it died out.
Speaker 5: And some of that was because people were a little
Speaker 5: bit concerned that there might be issues with respect to
Speaker 5: collecting eggs in terms of the population biology affecting the
Speaker 5: population biology of birds and things, and so it was
Speaker 5: kind of fell out of favor with a lot of people.
Speaker 4: So, okay, sology can mean the study of eggs, but
Speaker 4: it can also refer to the hobby of collecting wild
Speaker 4: bird eggs, also called egg in Now, at some point
Speaker 4: these amateur egg scholars stopped egging because it became illegal.
Speaker 4: People were like, well, you are stealing babies now. Wikipedia says,
Speaker 4: and I quote despite this, some of those who engage
Speaker 4: in egg collecting show considerable recidivism. That is legal speak
Speaker 4: for doing bad shit again like chasing the dragon egg.
Speaker 4: Wikipedia continues. One Colin Watson was convicted six times before
Speaker 4: he fell to his death in two thousand and six
Speaker 4: while attempting to climb to a nest high up in
Speaker 4: a tree. Another individual has been convicted nine times and
Speaker 4: imprisoned twice, and a third has been convicted fifty one times,
Speaker 4: imprisoned four times, and barred from entering Scotland during the
Speaker 4: breeding season. People are addicted to egg collecting. Also, one
Speaker 4: historical amateur ornithologist, Charles Bendyer, who stash of eight thousand
Speaker 4: formed the base of the Smithsonian's egg collection, climbed a
Speaker 4: tree for some hobbyist egg thievery and was rightfully, if
Speaker 4: you ask me, shot at and scared away, but escaped
Speaker 4: climbing down the tree with a raptor egg in his mouth.
Speaker 4: And the egg was so big that he had to
Speaker 4: and was willing to rather have his teeth broken to
Speaker 4: get it out of his mouth at like a cloach
Speaker 4: of face. So these were the oologists of your Perhaps
Speaker 4: that's why the term fell out of favor.
Speaker 5: But then the other thing that happened was you had
Speaker 5: the advent of things like cameras, and suddenly, you know,
Speaker 5: people you could make an argument that you didn't need
Speaker 5: the specimen per se if you could take a picture
Speaker 5: of the eggs.
Speaker 4: So do you think that if you're not out actively
Speaker 4: collecting and studying eggs, then you're not an oologist?
Speaker 5: Well, I think so. I like to describe it actually
Speaker 5: as an interesting way. I think from the perspective of humans,
Speaker 5: which is that in some level it's like pediatrics. Right,
Speaker 5: So here's this field where people study children, and this
Speaker 5: is a field where people studied eggs. But it's a
Speaker 5: specialization within pediatrics, right, a specific thing. And I think
Speaker 5: that in part it was just because collecting eggs kind
Speaker 5: of literally fell out of favor, and so the termology
Speaker 5: actually fell by the wayside. At some point, I.
Speaker 4: Think it's time to resurrect it.
Speaker 5: I mean, that's actually I mean there's a lot of
Speaker 5: science that can be done with eggs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So tell me about the collection you have, and
Speaker 4: what do you like about eggs, because I feel like
Speaker 4: you have to be into them in order to study them.
Speaker 4: I think aptitude is backed by passion, I'm guessing. So
Speaker 4: what is it about birds and bird eggs that you
Speaker 4: that you love or that you're drawn to?
Speaker 5: So what I'd say, I think it's interesting to say.
Speaker 5: I mean, eggs themselves are just beautiful things in nature,
Speaker 5: for one thing. But when you look at these collections,
Speaker 5: you start realizing that they're incredibly valuable pieces of our
Speaker 5: understanding of early natural history. So one of the things
Speaker 5: I always like to say to people is that you
Speaker 5: go back to our collections of bird specimens from the
Speaker 5: eighteen eighties a lot of times, and they have very
Speaker 5: little information on them. But with the egg collections, it's
Speaker 5: very common for them to have these detailed nest cards
Speaker 5: which describe exactly when the person found the nest, how
Speaker 5: many eggs were in it, what kind of tree it
Speaker 5: was in, very detailed locality information, and so these guys
Speaker 5: were actually collecting really excellent natural history data, probably tend
Speaker 5: to twenty to thirty years more earlier than a lot
Speaker 5: of the specimen collectors were, so it's a very incredible data.
Speaker 5: As a matter of fact, one of the things we're
Speaker 5: trying to do right now is work on various projects
Speaker 5: where we can use these data to look at what's
Speaker 5: going on today.
Speaker 4: So it's kind of like the thank you for the
Speaker 4: nest plundering. Back then you monocled aerolix, But yeah, no,
Speaker 4: we don't do that now. That's not a pastime. Let's
Speaker 4: just play video games or scroll through pictures of other
Speaker 4: people's vacations on a tiny screen. But the dates in
Speaker 4: all of those amateur egg collections are very helpful.
Speaker 5: So, for instance, we can look at nest laying dates
Speaker 5: for birds in the Midwest and ask the question if
Speaker 5: we have data from modern birds on when they were
Speaker 5: at laying and this is based on field observations from
Speaker 5: some of my colleagues. We can look at individual species
Speaker 5: and ask the question, our bird populations in the Chicago
Speaker 5: region laying their eggs at different times than they were historically,
Speaker 5: and it looks like the dates of laying have advanced actually,
Speaker 5: which is consistent with some of the potential issues that
Speaker 5: you'd expect due to climate change.
Speaker 4: So climate change is a biggie, as are the effects
Speaker 4: of pesticides and pollutants. So one huge detective story is
Speaker 4: often cited when the topic of vintage eggs comes up.
Speaker 5: You know, when I show this to people and I
Speaker 5: talk about why we have these collections. One of my
Speaker 5: favorite examples is, you know, paragon falcon eggs. So these
Speaker 5: were collected in the eighteen nineties in North Dakota. Wow,
Speaker 5: and paragon falcons in the nineteen sixties, along with ospreys
Speaker 5: and bald eagles, had their populations plummeted, and paragon falcons
Speaker 5: actually went extinct in eastern North America. And what was
Speaker 5: going on is they weren't having any reproductive success and
Speaker 5: it was because every time females laid eggs they would
Speaker 5: start sitting on them to incubate them, they would crack,
Speaker 5: and scientists thought that this pesticide DDT was causing the
Speaker 5: egg shell thinning. And one of the big pieces of
Speaker 5: evidence that led them to ban DDT in the US
Speaker 5: was a study by these guys named Hicky and Anderson
Speaker 5: where they went in and they measured pre d Deterra
Speaker 5: egg shell thickness in these birds with post egg shell
Speaker 5: host nineteen sixty during the DTI era use and they
Speaker 5: were able to show that they were demonstrably s thinner
Speaker 5: and a bunch of the key areas. And so it
Speaker 5: was a great scientific design that was possible because they
Speaker 5: had access to these collections. Yeah, and what I always
Speaker 5: like to point out is that you know, this guy
Speaker 5: that collected these things, this guy Foresight in nineteen seventeen,
Speaker 5: had no idea dead forty fifty years later his eggs
Speaker 5: would be used for a study like that.
Speaker 4: And so no, it's so cool to see current research
Speaker 4: being done on specimens that have been collected.
Speaker 5: One hundred years exactly.
Speaker 4: So just think some of the citizen science that you
Speaker 4: do today might help future generations to study, like which
Speaker 4: plants existed before the robots that we download our consciousness
Speaker 4: into took over the earth and mined all the gold
Speaker 4: to make toilets and then darken the sky with clean
Speaker 4: coal emissions. Is that too dark?
Speaker 2: Sorry?
Speaker 4: When they would collect the eggs, would they blow the
Speaker 4: eggs out or would they just rot? What was happening?
Speaker 4: Would they call? Okay? They'd hollow them out?
Speaker 5: Yeah? So yeah? Right? So I yes. They would put
Speaker 5: droll a little hole in them, and it was a
Speaker 5: it was a real art. I really good at it,
Speaker 5: and they would carefully inject a little bit of air
Speaker 5: and once you do that, you can blow the contents out
Speaker 5: of a very small hole and you're left with the
Speaker 5: egg shell.
Speaker 4: Can you explain to me how an egg is formed?
Speaker 4: Because it is kind of odd to be like, Hi,
Speaker 4: I'm a bird, I'm soft, a fluffy, and then bink,
Speaker 4: there's this hard thing that comes out of your cloaca.
Speaker 4: What is it?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Basically, the female has this developing ovum and her
Speaker 5: oviduct and it goes down and there's a glands that
Speaker 5: produce the shell material and it gradually rotates and forms
Speaker 5: and you get the production of this perfectly layered, hard
Speaker 5: and yet thin thing covering that developing embryo in an
Speaker 5: incredible way. And then there are all kinds of interesting
Speaker 5: things that happen after that with respect to making the
Speaker 5: eggs colorful or spotted or things like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So is it like layers on a jawbreaker, like
Speaker 4: layer after layer of like this cow wosium or is
Speaker 4: it like one layer of shell that happens at once.
Speaker 5: Yeah. No, it's my understanding of it is it's a
Speaker 5: layer thing, and they actually is there going down the oviduct,
Speaker 5: the shell gland is actually putting it, layering on that
Speaker 5: material so that when it comes out it's it's a
Speaker 5: perfectly formed egg.
Speaker 4: And then where is the air brushing station in the
Speaker 4: oviduct like or where are they putting on the speckles?
Speaker 4: And like the robin egg blue colors.
Speaker 5: It's done in the as it's passing along through the
Speaker 5: kloaca and in the oviduct. And there are these melonin
Speaker 5: producing glands that are cells that will actually make the color.
Speaker 5: But that's something that actually some of the aspects of
Speaker 5: that are still debated by scientists. We don't know how
Speaker 5: some colors on certain types of eggs are made.
Speaker 4: And I understand, like, okay, so we're surrounded by these
Speaker 4: beautiful posters of eggs and I understand eggs. It looks
Speaker 4: like granite boom. Is it an egg or a rock?
Speaker 4: I don't know. I can't tell. I'm not going to
Speaker 4: eat it. I get it. But like a bright blue
Speaker 4: robin's egg in a green tree. What's happening there that
Speaker 4: seems so conspicuous?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so quick answer. We don't know, okay, right, but
Speaker 5: there are these eggs. If I showed you eggs of Tinamus,
Speaker 5: which are these neotropical birds that a bunch of species,
Speaker 5: they look like little chickens that run around in either
Speaker 5: forest or an open country, and they lay these incredibly
Speaker 5: enameled eggs that can be anywhere from blue to brown
Speaker 5: to green, and they're just just incredibly enameled. And we
Speaker 5: don't know why they do that. Wow. And one hypothesis,
Speaker 5: which is kind of crazy, would be just they wanted
Speaker 5: to look so weird that no predator would look at
Speaker 5: that and go, yeah, that's something we should eat.
Speaker 4: And they wanted to look like a weird toy or
Speaker 4: a piece of ceramic or something like that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Because I mean, they literally don't look like anything
Speaker 5: you would find in nature.
Speaker 4: So down in the vault, John showed me another egg
Speaker 4: that looked like a prop like, no way did a
Speaker 4: bird button make? Oh my god, are you kidding me?
Speaker 5: These are these common murin nests eggs, so this cliff
Speaker 5: nester and you can see these are from Ireland, and
Speaker 5: then they would have been laid by different females such
Speaker 5: that the female could actually individually recognize each egg. And
Speaker 5: you can see these things, like all these little squiggles
Speaker 5: come from the the egg twisting as it's coming down
Speaker 5: the Wow, the overduct, and.
Speaker 4: It looks like you just took a sharpie remarker, yeah
Speaker 4: to them. It looks like you you let your like
Speaker 4: four year old nephew color them in, you know what
Speaker 4: I mean, But like or Jackson Pollock. Oh my god,
Speaker 4: they're gorgeous. Though.
Speaker 5: You can see this one sat for a while and.
Speaker 4: Oh inside of the oviducts.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, inside the overduct and so it gets.
Speaker 4: It gets more of that speckling exactly familiar. Oh, from
Speaker 4: those cells. That's so I never knew that's how it happened.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's so crazy to think of it twisting
Speaker 4: and turning and making those marks. So just squiggling down
Speaker 4: the bird butt canal, getting a streaky paint jo on
Speaker 4: the way. It's so delicately magically gross and beautiful. And
Speaker 4: what about egg shape? Why why are they the shape
Speaker 4: that they are?
Speaker 5: So that's an interesting question that's been studied and published
Speaker 5: on fairly recently, and one of the hypotheses is that
Speaker 5: it's related to body shape at some point. Eggs a lot.
Speaker 5: I mean, eggs have a fairly defined shape for the
Speaker 5: most part, but they're really interesting aspects of certain eggs. So,
Speaker 5: for instance, eggs of some of the birds that breed
Speaker 5: on cliffs, like common mirrors and things, are these long
Speaker 5: pointed have a thick base and then a long pointed tip.
Speaker 5: And one of the hypotheses has been that they've evolved
Speaker 5: that way because they're on a cliff face. And if
Speaker 5: you roll that egg on a cliff face, it'll just
Speaker 5: roll in a tight little circle because of its shape. Now,
Speaker 5: some other people have come along and said, now that's
Speaker 5: not what's going on, but that's a plausible explanation for
Speaker 5: that egg shape.
Speaker 4: And do you eat eggs? I do eat eggs, Okay,
Speaker 4: So you're not like you don't have a situation where
Speaker 4: you're like, oh, I can't do it right. No, is
Speaker 4: it bad for us to eat chicken eggs?
Speaker 5: So I always like to say that. My pediatrician used
Speaker 5: to flip back and forth. Every year I went to him,
Speaker 5: Oh it really so my mom crazy, Like he would
Speaker 5: come in and say, eggs are good for your son.
Speaker 5: M good. Nope, next year, eggs are bad for you.
Speaker 4: So side note, I was like, yeah, what's up with
Speaker 4: eggs having this like big reputation. So in nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 4: the American Heart Association advised people not to have more
Speaker 4: than three egg yolks per week. It's like eggs are canceled.
Speaker 4: Unfollow eggs on Twitter, do not invite them to breakfast.
Speaker 4: And then years later some news came out that was like, nah,
Speaker 4: eggs are fine. And then in the last few years,
Speaker 4: this new cholesterol kills campaign came out and that's done
Speaker 4: by an organization called the Truth about Eggs. But that
Speaker 4: turns out to be a vegan advocacy group. So I
Speaker 4: turned to official science papers for some sanity, and there
Speaker 4: was one about how eggs have gotten such a bad
Speaker 4: rap and seriously, they are fine, And I was like Okay,
Speaker 4: cool science paper, I trust you. And then I scrolled
Speaker 4: down to the author bio of this science paper and
Speaker 4: he worked for the egg industry. Good god, eggs. How
Speaker 4: is your pr more complicated than the jfk assassination? This
Speaker 4: is like of the mobs specialized in brunch scrambles. I
Speaker 4: cannot keep track, So I guess if you are at
Speaker 4: risk for heart disease, consult your physician and read some papers,
Speaker 4: and pay attention to who's writing the papers. I may
Speaker 4: be your weird uncle, but I am no doctor. Well,
Speaker 4: John is technically a doctor.
Speaker 5: But I'm not an MD.
Speaker 4: Not that you'll be making a bunch of omelets now,
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, But if you were, you'd have to break
Speaker 4: some eggs. But what if it's a museum egg and
Speaker 4: you're an oologist? Have you ever broken an egg and
Speaker 4: been like oh shit?
Speaker 5: Well, so the quick answer is no.
Speaker 4: But back in the cool egg dungeon, John withdraws drawer
Speaker 4: slowly and he tells me a tale of a thousand cringes.
Speaker 5: One of the greatest curators of birds at the Field Museum,
Speaker 5: a guy named Mel Trailer, apparently pulled this drawer out
Speaker 5: at one point too far and dropped it, and so
Speaker 5: even the greatest people can make mistakes. Now, the truth
Speaker 5: of the matter is it looks bad, but you're not
Speaker 5: really losing it.
Speaker 4: You're not losing the data.
Speaker 5: But still, I don't even imagine what it was like
Speaker 5: today that that happened.
Speaker 4: What kind of words do you think came out of
Speaker 4: his way?
Speaker 5: He was an incredible gentleman, So I bet he's swore
Speaker 5: quite a bit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that is devastating. And so what has been the
Speaker 4: rarest or most beautiful specimen that you've seen?
Speaker 5: So I think some of the coolest eggs in the
Speaker 5: world are belonging to a bird called the Gira cuckoo
Speaker 5: from South America, and there are these incredible eggs that
Speaker 5: they lay in big numbers. They're cooperative breeders, and I'm
Speaker 5: not exactly sure some of their relatives actually have multiple
Speaker 5: females on the same territory and they'll they'll actually throw
Speaker 5: eggs out on average, but they'll end up with a
Speaker 5: mixed nest of multiple eggs of different females. And these
Speaker 5: guys have so they'll have up to ten or twelve
Speaker 5: eggs in the nest and they start off with this
Speaker 5: white powder but around them but it's a blue egg,
Speaker 5: and so over time the blue wears off, and it
Speaker 5: wears off in this kind of patchwork fashion that just
Speaker 5: gives a really beautiful color. Oooho.
Speaker 4: So they have almost like an like an opposite pan patina.
Speaker 5: All yes, exactly.
Speaker 4: Oh wow. So later on the tour I got a
Speaker 4: chance to see these bad boys and they're this lovely
Speaker 4: minty aqua color like a tourmaline blue with white patterns overlaid,
Speaker 4: and it was like a gas pathon. They're gorgeous. I mean,
Speaker 4: they look like ceramic because we just don't ever have
Speaker 4: an opportunity to see a lot of these right, you
Speaker 4: know ever, because when are you going to come across
Speaker 4: a cliff nest or you know, something that's thirty feet
Speaker 4: off the ground hidden behind leaves, So that geara cuckoo
Speaker 4: with the gorgeous eggs is sneaky and she leaves them
Speaker 4: in nests that are not hers. A bunch of cuckoo
Speaker 4: birds do this, and then their babies hatch, and then
Speaker 4: they bump out the other babies and the parents just
Speaker 4: don't even seem to notice that all of their babies
Speaker 4: are gone, and they now have one giant baby that
Speaker 4: does not look like them. Such gossip, and then this
Speaker 4: bamboozlry happens with other species.
Speaker 5: Of course, these are annis, which are these blackbirds from
Speaker 5: the tropics, which are cuckoo relatives, and so they're and
Speaker 5: these are these ones that have these nests that multiple
Speaker 5: females in the group will lay in. Yeah, with the
Speaker 5: caveat being that apparently there's a older female that'll come
Speaker 5: along and throw most of the eggs out over time
Speaker 5: and then lay most of hers in there, but not
Speaker 5: on anyways, what a bitch?
Speaker 4: Are there any eggs that you know of that are
Speaker 4: like so valuable monetarily wise, like, are there any that
Speaker 4: are like underglass?
Speaker 5: And well if I if.
Speaker 4: I, yeah, that's true, you would have Actually.
Speaker 5: We have a plaster cast downstairs of an elephant bird
Speaker 5: from Madagascar, which is a bird that was these one
Speaker 5: of these giant flightless things that was living in Madagascar
Speaker 5: up until the time the first humans got there. And
Speaker 5: the beaches in Madagascar some places are littered with small
Speaker 5: pieces of elephant bird eggshell, and there are a few
Speaker 5: elephant bird eggs that have been found whole, and a
Speaker 5: lot of those are in museums. And my understanding is
Speaker 5: those are worth sometimes upwards of thirty to fifty thousand dollars.
Speaker 4: That's a lot of money for it.
Speaker 5: But I think of many omelets. Those things would have made.
Speaker 4: So many omelets, which is probably why they are extinct.
Speaker 4: Exactly right, what's the biggest egg you have ever cracked?
Speaker 4: I once tried to eat an emu egg and it
Speaker 4: required a hack.
Speaker 5: Saw was that any good?
Speaker 4: It was very rich, it was huge, it was overwhelming.
Speaker 4: But we whipped it up and made an omelet and
Speaker 4: it was like the most buttery, kind of fatty, tasty one.
Speaker 4: But it was like huge. It looked like a avocado.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So I have to admit that that most of
Speaker 5: my time has been spent with chicken eggs in terms
Speaker 5: of actually cooking and eating. So I'm trying to think
Speaker 5: if I've ever actually I think I ever have actually
Speaker 5: eating another bird's egg species. Not even I have once
Speaker 5: kind a duck or Yeah.
Speaker 4: Really, I once had deviled quails eggs, which was weird.
Speaker 4: I just felt like a giant because they're so little.
Speaker 4: But how do you take your eggs?
Speaker 5: Over? Easy?
Speaker 4: So does that mean runny yolk?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Why does that gross me out? But it doesn't gross
Speaker 4: other people?
Speaker 5: Out.
Speaker 4: Should I be grossed out?
Speaker 5: It's supposed to soak up what's in what's left in
Speaker 5: the plate. If you've got potatoes in the plate, it
Speaker 5: like makes the potatoes taste better.
Speaker 4: I don't know why. I don't know why. There's something
Speaker 4: that grosses me out about it. Okay, So another thing
Speaker 4: that grosses people out the kalaisa. Now these two coily
Speaker 4: white threads that are attached to the yolk. What are they?
Speaker 4: What are they? Okay, there's just nothing much, just ropes
Speaker 4: of protein. They're actually markers of a fresh egg since
Speaker 4: they kind of disappear as it ages. But why are
Speaker 4: they there, like tiny slimy party streamers. Well, they suspend
Speaker 4: the yolk in the middle of the egg, kind of
Speaker 4: like the slingshot ride at the County Fair. But depending
Speaker 4: on how you personally feel about egg protein squiggles and
Speaker 4: carnival rides, one may have more screaming than the other.
Speaker 4: Also side note, Oh my god, I just went down
Speaker 4: a hole watching a compilation of like go pro footage
Speaker 4: of couples on the slingshot ride, and it was horrifying
Speaker 4: and so so amusing. And I only know from the
Speaker 4: Gelatology episode that it's funny because we know that like
Speaker 4: everyone is safe in the end. But oh my god,
Speaker 4: watching adults screaming for their moms on carnival rides is
Speaker 4: something else. Wow, oh my god. Also never ever going
Speaker 4: on that ever. Okay, back to egg boogers. I need
Speaker 4: to get over it because other people seem to love it.
Speaker 4: But for some reason, the yolk, the yolk is what
Speaker 4: the chick eats inside the egg. Correct or is the
Speaker 4: yolk the.
Speaker 5: Chick the yolk is the is what it's going to eat.
Speaker 4: Okay, yeah, so that's that would be the baby chick's food.
Speaker 4: So I should be okay with eating that, right, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, except that, of course that's the stuff that my
Speaker 5: pediatrician was always worried about every other.
Speaker 4: Year, the cholesterol AND's up. When you're cracking hard boiled eggs.
Speaker 4: Do you have a better strategy because you understand the
Speaker 4: mechanics and the anatomy of eggs.
Speaker 5: No, that's one of those things that you just go
Speaker 5: for literally, like I think, and it's a satisfying thing
Speaker 5: because it's in the end you have something like solid
Speaker 5: in your hand that you can eat. I think actually
Speaker 5: cracking raw eggs is more of an artistic technique that
Speaker 5: I've never fully developed.
Speaker 4: I know the people that can do one in each hand.
Speaker 5: Yeah, those people, like how do you learn that?
Speaker 4: Masters? They should be oologists to be honest. They need
Speaker 4: to take up the term as well. And now, how
Speaker 4: many eggs do you guys have at the Field Museum
Speaker 4: in collections?
Speaker 5: So the actual number is probably on the order of
Speaker 5: about one hundred thousand.
Speaker 4: Oh my god.
Speaker 5: But see, so the interesting thing about eggs is in collections,
Speaker 5: like this is not the number of eggs individually, it's
Speaker 5: a number of sets of eggs. And so we have
Speaker 5: about twenty thousand sets of eggs, which means that the
Speaker 5: eggs are laying by a given female at a given time.
Speaker 5: And there's what's called clutch size, which is how many
Speaker 5: eggs they've laid for that nest. And that's actually a
Speaker 5: truly interesting thing about avian biology because there's lots of variations.
Speaker 5: So we were talking about those elephant birds clutch size
Speaker 5: and elephant birds was two, right, which is, like you said,
Speaker 5: that's probably why there's no elephant birds left if you
Speaker 5: think about it. Ostriches are another big flightless bird, and
Speaker 5: they have clutch sizes where single actually multiple females lay
Speaker 5: in the same nest, but they'll be upwards of twenty
Speaker 5: eggs in the nest because these female lays ten to
Speaker 5: eleven and they're basically just hedging their bets with respect
Speaker 5: to producing their young because a lot of them are
Speaker 5: gonna get picked off by predators over time.
Speaker 4: And now they also have super thick shells because they
Speaker 4: have to drop like twelve feet from an Ostrich's kloaca
Speaker 4: to the ground. Right, not quite twelve feet, but you
Speaker 4: know what I mean.
Speaker 5: But the ostrich actually lays them sitting down. Yeah, for
Speaker 5: the most part, but they are really thick and like
Speaker 5: they're used by bushmen of the Kalahari to store water in.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, what a cool perse. I mean talking
Speaker 4: about a clutch that would be quite an evening clutch,
Speaker 4: so they call little evening handbags. You're like, Didna, it's
Speaker 4: an egg.
Speaker 5: I'd be willing to bet that's been done.
Speaker 4: Just FOI, Yes, it has been done. Is there any
Speaker 4: flim flam about eggs that you'd like to debunk? Any
Speaker 4: myths about eggs that You're like, that is not how
Speaker 4: it is.
Speaker 5: Myths about eggs.
Speaker 4: Bunnies don't lay them, despite Eastern they don't.
Speaker 5: That's absolutely true.
Speaker 4: Do you love springtime because of the egg imagery or
Speaker 4: are you like, come on, guys, no.
Speaker 5: Because it gets really weird because of the bunny aspect
Speaker 5: of it. I think that confuses the biology. I think.
Speaker 5: I think Easter egg hunting is great. I think Easter
Speaker 5: egg dyeing is great. The whole buddy aspect of it
Speaker 5: really gets messed up, right, So I don't know how
Speaker 5: that happened.
Speaker 4: But how do you feel about platy pie and mammals
Speaker 4: that lay duckt off bill?
Speaker 5: See, that's that's cool because they're just trying to be birds.
Speaker 4: Right, Well, how did they even how did that even
Speaker 4: come about?
Speaker 5: That's a good question if from an evolutionary standpoint, it
Speaker 5: would be potentially a really retained characteristic from their ancestry
Speaker 5: with reptiles.
Speaker 4: And now reptiles, were they the og when it comes
Speaker 4: to egg laying? And then I mean because birds reptiles
Speaker 4: similar evolutionary pathway dinosaurs.
Speaker 5: I mean birds are dinosaurs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, birds are dinosaurs.
Speaker 5: So we're looking at just I think birds are just
Speaker 5: better dinosaurs.
Speaker 4: I think, I mean they It's funny because for so
Speaker 4: long it's like dinosaurs are extinct, and they're like, no,
Speaker 4: they're not. There's a pigeon done. It's boom. Also, where
Speaker 4: do pigeons have nests?
Speaker 5: They nest on little ledges and stuff. But that's a
Speaker 5: really great observation because as many pigeons as there are
Speaker 5: in like the city of Chicago, I almost never see
Speaker 5: a nest. And then the other thing is that so
Speaker 5: they're that group of birds. So the columbu Day, the
Speaker 5: family that they belong to, they lay clutches of two.
Speaker 5: That's the only that's the total number. And so you
Speaker 5: would think, like, if you're laying two eggs on a ledge,
Speaker 5: any predator could come down and eat those things. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and they're not particularly tough birds. So how to why
Speaker 5: are there so many pigeons?
Speaker 4: I don't know. I have a theory that maybe they
Speaker 4: just asexually bud and a feather falls off and then
Speaker 4: a whole nother pigeon sprouts around it.
Speaker 5: And the only thing I would say that our argues
Speaker 5: against that is I could show you pigeon eggs in
Speaker 5: our collection, so we know they do it. Dang it.
Speaker 4: There was once I lived in an apartment building and
Speaker 4: a pigeon got inside and I did see a pigeon
Speaker 4: build a nest inside on the carpet, and I told
Speaker 4: my landlords. I was like, Yo, there's a pigeon like
Speaker 4: inside like on the carpet. And they're like, leave alone,
Speaker 4: And I was like, what about bird mites? I feel
Speaker 4: like we need to worry about that, like can we
Speaker 4: scoot it? So I did see one pigeon nest once,
Speaker 4: but it was like one foot away from my door,
Speaker 4: inside on a carpet, and that it was just all
Speaker 4: kinds of wrong.
Speaker 5: And did you see any pigeon mites? No?
Speaker 4: But I think I moved before. Last thing I needed
Speaker 4: was bird cooties.
Speaker 5: Do you don't know if that's a whole nothing you should?
Speaker 5: You can do a whole other ology on parasitology.
Speaker 4: Because birds have mites.
Speaker 5: Oh, we actually go into the field now and we
Speaker 5: do an active job of trying to collect them because
Speaker 5: they're they're co evolving with the birds essentially, and so
Speaker 5: there's some really interesting questions you can ask with mites.
Speaker 4: Do you get a lot of gifts that have eggs
Speaker 4: on them? To people say I saw this and I
Speaker 4: thought of you.
Speaker 5: I do because we did a book of eggs, and
Speaker 5: so people kind of know that I've worked.
Speaker 4: Yeah, how many books about eggs do you own? In reference?
Speaker 5: So I benefit by being in a place that has
Speaker 5: a where our bird library is right down the hall,
Speaker 5: and that means I don't have to buy as many
Speaker 5: books on eggs. I can actually just go down and
Speaker 5: surreptitiously grab them off the shelf and then check them out,
Speaker 5: and then the librarians have to come track me down
Speaker 5: to get them back.
Speaker 4: You're like, you're not too far though, I mean, and
Speaker 4: who's going to make better use of a book about
Speaker 4: eggs than you?
Speaker 5: Well, that's my argument exactly. But when somebody else wants it,
Speaker 5: they need to be able to find me.
Speaker 4: Did you ever have to do the thing in high
Speaker 4: school where they gave you an egg and they're like,
Speaker 4: don't break it. This is what parenthood is like, did
Speaker 4: they ever make you do that?
Speaker 5: Oh? I never did that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they would. I think they used to do that
Speaker 4: to scare to scare teenagers away from like becoming parents
Speaker 4: too early. Is they'd be like, you have to take
Speaker 4: care of this egg for a week and if you
Speaker 4: break it, you fail or whatever. So I think it
Speaker 4: used to be like a which I feel like taking
Speaker 4: care of an unfertilized chicken egg is a lot easier
Speaker 4: than an infant. But what do I know?
Speaker 5: So you know now that you mentioned that, the one
Speaker 5: thing I remember like that was daycamp and doing egg tosses.
Speaker 5: Oh right, It's like I was always one of those
Speaker 5: kids that didn't want to break the egg. I did
Speaker 5: not want to do it. Some kids didn't care. I
Speaker 5: did not want to break the EGGA had an early appreciation.
Speaker 4: Now, if you bought a fertilized chicken egg, like from
Speaker 4: Whole Foods because you believed that for some reason fertilized
Speaker 4: chicken eggs were better, could you take it home, put
Speaker 4: it on a heating blanket, and have some chickens in
Speaker 4: a couple of weeks?
Speaker 5: Good question, U, I don't know. Yeah, and I wouldn't
Speaker 5: want to find out. Actually, to be honest with you,
Speaker 5: what do you do? Yeah, exactly if it worked, and
Speaker 5: I wouldn't buy fertilized chicken eggs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, what is What is the difference of when you're
Speaker 4: eating an egg being fertilized or not.
Speaker 5: It could be taste or something, I think, But again,
Speaker 5: I don't have any intention of finding out anytimes.
Speaker 4: I look this up and Apparently you can hatch chickens
Speaker 4: from fertilized eggs from like Trader Joe's, provided they're pretty
Speaker 4: fresh and actually fertilized. Have you heard of ballute? Hi?
Speaker 4: Sorry me again, just with another quick necessary aside. So ballute?
Speaker 4: What is it? Southeast Asian snack often consumed with beer.
Speaker 4: It consists of a boiled duck egg. So what's the
Speaker 4: big deal?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 4: So the duck egg was fertile and the baby duck
Speaker 4: has been developing for two to three weeks. It has
Speaker 4: like bones and a beak and stuff, just all boiled
Speaker 4: and eaten. But a reminder, lobster was once served as
Speaker 4: prison food because the idea of eating a sea cockroach
Speaker 4: was considered disgusting and punishment. And I don't even know
Speaker 4: what's in nacho cheese, but I could eat it all
Speaker 4: day long. Now, if you've ever boiled a fertilized egg
Speaker 4: from the grocery store, you have eaten ballute. Just very
Speaker 4: very under ripe, if you will. So ballute? Has John
Speaker 4: heard of it?
Speaker 5: Yes? I have? Oh what do you think about it?
Speaker 5: I don't think I would.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I think I'm good without eating ballute.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: When I first found out what ballute was. I was like,
Speaker 4: is this a real thing? Or am I living in
Speaker 4: a nightmare right now?
Speaker 5: I think you know, you go around the world and
Speaker 5: people do a lot of interesting I know things.
Speaker 4: I mean, I've eaten shrimp eyeballs, so whatever you know it,
Speaker 4: I didn't. I did it for a dollar, So that
Speaker 4: part of it was good.
Speaker 5: There you go to see what would somebody have to
Speaker 5: pay me to eat a balloon? Yeah? How much? See
Speaker 5: I'm not coming up with an easy number there.
Speaker 4: Two thousand dollars now would do it? Okay? I know
Speaker 4: how many bites you'd have to eat the whole thing though?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Two?
Speaker 4: All right, so that's your going right for.
Speaker 5: Eating you paid? That was that hard it? We can
Speaker 5: sure you are two thousand dollars on me in a balloon.
Speaker 4: You have to really set it up like you gotta
Speaker 4: you gotta have it like it's your wedding day, like
Speaker 4: and send out invites. Everyone's informal where like we're gonna
Speaker 4: get them to eat the balloon.
Speaker 5: It's the Twitter age, it is.
Speaker 4: I have some questions from listeners, can I ask you?
Speaker 5: Yes you can?
Speaker 4: Okay, some of them are for my dad, hi'd ad.
Speaker 4: But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners.
Speaker 4: We're going to take a quick break for sponsors of
Speaker 4: the show. Sponsors. Why sponsors? You know what they do?
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Speaker 4: Okay, your questions, but this first question, though, is from
Speaker 4: Neo Williams and it's a good one, one than has
Speaker 4: plagued me ever since. Songwriter Joe Riposo posed it on
Speaker 4: Sesame Street Orange Jumpers. The chicken or the egg? What
Speaker 4: came first?
Speaker 5: Yeah, good question, I mean I guess the egg. Well,
Speaker 5: it's just funny because if you look at chicken as
Speaker 5: a common name for gallas gallas, which is a bird,
Speaker 5: and dinosaurs, the ancestors of chickens laid eggs. Then the
Speaker 5: egg came before the chicken.
Speaker 4: Is we figured it out?
Speaker 5: There we go.
Speaker 4: God, everything in my life is so much easier now.
Speaker 5: I get a lot of letters about that.
Speaker 4: I well, and you know what, I'll be like, why
Speaker 4: don't you console the noologist? I have one. He's right here.
Speaker 4: Jerry Davis wants to know are there any eggs that
Speaker 4: are poisonous to eat?
Speaker 5: Wow, that's an interesting question. I don't know the quick
Speaker 5: answer to that's no, not that I can think of.
Speaker 5: We were just talking about some of the today, some
Speaker 5: of the other you know, like there's a bird that
Speaker 5: was found to be poisonous in New Guinea called a
Speaker 5: pit WHOI But it's it's because it eats beetles and
Speaker 5: is able to sequester the poisons. But it's eggs I
Speaker 5: don't think would be poisonous.
Speaker 4: Oh, good to know where to gobba hooey.
Speaker 5: But who are you? Whoey Pita hooey pita whoy.
Speaker 4: Spencer Tod wants to know, is a breakfast chicken egg
Speaker 4: really only one cell?
Speaker 5: Yes? Really?
Speaker 4: Yep it's one cell?
Speaker 5: Ye.
Speaker 4: Where's the nucleus and the ribosomes and the organelles and stuff?
Speaker 5: So they're they're they're there, And I mean this is
Speaker 5: like the Yeah.
Speaker 4: I guess that makes sense because of like, any egg
Speaker 4: that a female of any species produces one.
Speaker 5: Cell is one cell. Oh that's weird.
Speaker 4: Oh I've never thought about that.
Speaker 5: That's awesome.
Speaker 4: Sarah Michelle wants to discuss century eggs. How did they
Speaker 4: get started? Do you have you heard about these?
Speaker 5: So these are these ones that have been sitting around
Speaker 5: for a long time that for various likes of time,
Speaker 5: you know what I mean, probably started because just somebody
Speaker 5: had an egg and forgot to eat it and then
Speaker 5: found it again and just said, wow, I'm gonna eat it.
Speaker 5: It's like, what I would tell them is that doesn't
Speaker 5: make it a good idea. It's like.
Speaker 4: Someone yeah, ray A Kisha asks the same thing, how
Speaker 4: can I deter my husband from eating one hundred year eggs? Barf?
Speaker 4: So I got to look that up. But just because
Speaker 4: you can do it doesn't mean you should. Now I
Speaker 4: was not familiar with Chinese century eggs, but they're traditionally
Speaker 4: made by coating duck or chicken eggs in salt, alkaline,
Speaker 4: clay and rice holes, and then they're left to ferment
Speaker 4: for a few weeks. Now. The alkaline addition creates this
Speaker 4: black jelly like egg white and a creamy kind of
Speaker 4: dark green egg yolk. They have a lot of aliases.
Speaker 4: They've been called one hundred year eggs, thousand year eggs,
Speaker 4: also millennium eggs, all of them in exaggeration. They're really
Speaker 4: only fermenting a few weeks now. One name, which may
Speaker 4: or may not be an exaggeration, the Thaie term translates
Speaker 4: to horse urine egg. Due to this spell, I cannot
Speaker 4: verify the veracity of that comparison. Ken John, Well.
Speaker 5: Again, you give me two thousand bucks, and now we're talking.
Speaker 4: I love that You're going right, you know, switch from
Speaker 4: a bird researcher to just a daredevil bird bird egg eater.
Speaker 4: Brook Bosone wants to know what's the smallest egg in
Speaker 4: the world. Is it a hummingbird?
Speaker 5: It? It'll be one of the hummingbirds, and there are
Speaker 5: enough small hummingbirds that probably have similar to sized eggs.
Speaker 5: The smallest hummingbird in the world is a bee hummingbird
Speaker 5: from Cuba. And you know, the amazing thing there is
Speaker 5: they have clutch sizes of two and the egg of
Speaker 5: a bee hummingbird would take up a large amount of
Speaker 5: the you know, as we said, it's one cell, and
Speaker 5: it's a large amount of the internal space in a
Speaker 5: female bee hummingbird.
Speaker 4: So is it just like the size of a tic
Speaker 4: tac bigger than it?
Speaker 5: Actually looks very much like a tictac. That's exactly what
Speaker 5: you think.
Speaker 4: I got a chance to see some on the Vault
Speaker 4: tour and yep, they're just like a scoch, larger than
Speaker 4: a tic tac, but way smaller than a mento. They
Speaker 4: are zero percent refreshing. Do not eat them on a date.
Speaker 5: And so here are the chicklets. That's a black chin
Speaker 5: hummingbird from Arizona.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, I've definitely eaten breath.
Speaker 5: Mian's larger than that, exactly. Oh my god. How cute
Speaker 5: and tiny, which reminds me of an old joke from
Speaker 5: when I was a kid, which was but did the
Speaker 5: hummingbirds say when he laid an ostrich egg? When she
Speaker 5: laid an ostrich egg? What out?
Speaker 4: That actually segues perfectly into Katie CoP's question. Here's a
Speaker 4: stupid question. Just laying an egg hurt? Like it hurts
Speaker 4: for a woman human woman to give birth, but we
Speaker 4: don't do it a few times a week.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I was actually looking as I prepped for this.
Speaker 5: And you know, our modern chickens we eat five billion
Speaker 5: eggs a year in the US alone. Wow, and the
Speaker 5: average chicken produces like three hundred and sixty.
Speaker 4: Or something, yeah, like almost daily?
Speaker 5: Right, yeah, I mean just like it's incredible, and so
Speaker 5: does it hurt? I mean, I don't know. It's not
Speaker 5: the same as childbirth in humans.
Speaker 4: Right, in childbirth we have real messed up pelvises, like
Speaker 4: our pelvis is are not These are not so great.
Speaker 4: See the Ologies episodes on Primatology and Gynecology for more
Speaker 4: on that. Did you ever see the movie cool Hand, Luke?
Speaker 5: Oh gosh, you know, yes you did. What do you
Speaker 5: think I like? Cool Hand, Luke?
Speaker 4: What about the egg eating part?
Speaker 5: Yeah? It it never bothered me.
Speaker 1: Really, nobody ever eat fifty eggs?
Speaker 7: Hey, baba, luguts.
Speaker 5: We got a bed here. My boss said he can
Speaker 5: make fifty eggs. He ate fifty eggs.
Speaker 4: Just thinking about that sometimes when I make like a
Speaker 4: lot of like a clutch if you will, of hard
Speaker 4: boiled eggs, sometimes I think about that and I think, oh.
Speaker 5: God, see I think it was Rocky's the same way
Speaker 5: where he comes in after the run, and just like
Speaker 5: so I would never do that.
Speaker 4: The funny thing is if you asked me to eat
Speaker 4: an undercooked egg, a raw egg, I'd be like absolutely no,
Speaker 4: get out of my face. But if you asked me
Speaker 4: to eat cookie dough which contains them, I'm like, sign
Speaker 4: me up. I'm there right, what's the deal?
Speaker 5: It's completely illogical.
Speaker 4: Mind never matter. Todd McLaren actually asks what's your favorite
Speaker 4: egg art? Ukrainian Easter egg, Madieira lace egg, Faberge egg.
Speaker 5: Oh. I think the those Ukrainian eggs are like incredible,
Speaker 5: really beautiful, really amazing pieces of artwork.
Speaker 4: So these Ukrainian eggs or pisanka are ornately detailed using
Speaker 4: milten beeswax, and they just keep dunking them and die
Speaker 4: over and over again. And yes, there is a museum
Speaker 4: to pasanka eggs in Eastern Europe in case you're into that.
Speaker 4: Now onto a very special question from someone who is
Speaker 4: technically your grandpod Larry Ward aka my Pops. He wants
Speaker 4: to know how are snake eggs incubated? Does the mom
Speaker 4: or dad snakes sit on them?
Speaker 5: Yeah? They do. Actually, yeah, they provide some bit. But
Speaker 5: it's funny because that's a good question. Actually we need
Speaker 5: a herpetologist, yeah, in the sense that because they're ectotherms.
Speaker 4: So for this I brought out the big guns and
Speaker 4: buy guns, I mean snakes, and I reached out to
Speaker 4: doctor David Stein of the herpetology episode aka Alongside Wild
Speaker 4: on Twitter, and he responded swiftly and with informational precision.
Speaker 4: He said, not all snakes lay eggs, but of those
Speaker 4: in two the vast majority lay them and leave. They
Speaker 4: just incubate on their own. Now, pythons are a notable exception.
Speaker 4: They coil around the eggs and they can use muscle
Speaker 4: contractions to generate heat. So I like to think of
Speaker 4: pythons doing like a twitchy dance, like let's hatch these
Speaker 4: dang babies. So thanks for the question, Pops. Alicia Mansfield
Speaker 4: asked what causes color variations and eggs of the same species,
Speaker 4: for example, chicken eggs coming in brown, white, or blue.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's a I mean, some of it's just individual variation.
Speaker 5: And so there's some kind of genetic variation in the DNA. Well,
Speaker 5: I guess the DNA that's producing the compounds that are
Speaker 5: being deposited on the shells eventually. But there are these birds,
Speaker 5: like these common mirrors, where they've actually evolved the capacity.
Speaker 5: It's of their nesting on colonies on these cliffs and
Speaker 5: everybody looks alike, and so the have the ability to
Speaker 5: lay unique looking eggs that can be completely different looking
Speaker 5: from the bird right next to them, and that allows
Speaker 5: them to imprint on those eggs and then find them
Speaker 5: when they fly to and from the colony to eat.
Speaker 5: It's an incredibly cool thing.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 5: And they're still trying to do the research. So they're
Speaker 5: trying to figure out whether females lay the same kind
Speaker 5: of eggs from year to year. Oh, so, whether that's
Speaker 5: a genetically encoded pattern, And those are really interesting questions.
Speaker 4: That's great. I never even thought about that. Like when
Speaker 4: you see speckled eggs that maybe look like granite, Yeah,
Speaker 4: are those carbon copies of each other? Every time or
Speaker 4: are the speckles in different places.
Speaker 5: I used to think that it probably was. There was
Speaker 5: probably a lot of variation that was genetically based. It
Speaker 5: may very well be that most of it's just randomly
Speaker 5: involved with how fast they're passing through the kloaca at
Speaker 5: the time, and you know when they come out. It's
Speaker 5: literally just something different every time, and the birds can
Speaker 5: imprint on it and then find it the next time.
Speaker 4: Wow, that's so fascinating. Also fascinating, of course how people
Speaker 4: treat and eat their eggs all over the globe. I'm
Speaker 4: told that also, you don't have to refrigerate eggs in Europe.
Speaker 4: You just leave your eggs on the counter.
Speaker 5: Those Europeans, I know, they leave.
Speaker 4: Their butter on the counter. They have healthcare. They're crazy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, I mean I but I when I was
Speaker 5: working in Brazil the first time people used to leave
Speaker 5: mayonnaise i' refrigerated out in the forest.
Speaker 4: Oh hell no.
Speaker 5: And after a while I started eating it. It was fine.
Speaker 4: Did you lose a lot of weight just because you
Speaker 4: were constantly sick?
Speaker 5: No? Really?
Speaker 4: Now, speaking of salmonilla, is that something that you worry about?
Speaker 5: Yes?
Speaker 4: Okay? Is that now? Salmonilla? It comes maybe from an
Speaker 4: infected bird. It comes right down the old poop shoot,
Speaker 4: and then you need to wash the eggs to avoid
Speaker 4: the salmonilla.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, And I think that that that's one thing that's,
Speaker 5: you know, kind of amazing about industry is how well
Speaker 5: they're able to actually keep those things from being issues. Really,
Speaker 5: I mean, there's a salmonilla outbreak these days. It's kind
Speaker 5: of stunning how quickly we know about it, and how
Speaker 5: quickly in most cases they figure out exactly where they
Speaker 5: come from.
Speaker 4: I know, isn't it crazy? Yes, salmonilla I just found
Speaker 4: this out is the same genus and bacteria that causes
Speaker 4: typhoid fever and of course just a whole bunch of
Speaker 4: food poisoning. Now it can get on the eggs when
Speaker 4: it passes through the oviduct of a chicken or in
Speaker 4: the egg as it's forming. Now, not all chickens have salmonilla,
Speaker 4: and some will show signs like lethargy if they do
Speaker 4: have it. Now, before you go hatching a crate of
Speaker 4: fertilized eggs, do know. It turns out the backyard chickens,
Speaker 4: if they have salmonilla, can pass it along, especially as
Speaker 4: the CDC warns if there has been snuggling of the
Speaker 4: chicken and salmonilla poisoning does land folks in the hospital,
Speaker 4: or it can be fatal, So don't go licking a
Speaker 4: bunch of chickens or eating raw eggs or poultry. Ironically,
Speaker 4: eating raw sand seems to be fine, but that's because
Speaker 4: the name salmonilla was derived from one doctor Edgar Elmer Salmon,
Speaker 4: a veterinary surgeon for whom it was named. Here, doctor Salmon,
Speaker 4: we have bestowed you with a legacy for generations a
Speaker 4: very confusing fish sounding disease of the chicken butt that
Speaker 4: scares people away from cookie dough. Also, if you're like
Speaker 4: a real cookie dough trollop like myself, just go ahead
Speaker 4: and make it with pasteurized eggs. Feel free to eat
Speaker 4: the whole bowl. Does anything in John's work cause him
Speaker 4: to eat entire salad bowls filled with rock cookies? What
Speaker 4: is the most annoying thing about eggs or your job?
Speaker 5: Well, with eggs, I would say it's keeping track of them.
Speaker 5: So you have a clutch, but you have four or
Speaker 5: five eggs in that clutch, and so you've got to
Speaker 5: figure out, you know, they number them all, and so
Speaker 5: you just got to be careful with respect to getting
Speaker 5: things mixed up and things, and then you don't have
Speaker 5: anything else to go on if things do get mixed up.
Speaker 4: Oof. Yeah, that's true. I mean you can't put a
Speaker 4: little number on them, or they.
Speaker 5: Do put little numbers on them. But let's say there
Speaker 5: are a bunch of little numbers and they were put
Speaker 5: on a one hundred and twenty years ago. It's possible
Speaker 5: that you could have a hard time deciphering what was
Speaker 5: what was done.
Speaker 4: Do you find that the notes are like very poetically
Speaker 4: descriptive more so than they would be these days?
Speaker 5: Not really, it's the more what's beautiful about him is
Speaker 5: a different handwriting. Oh, people had so much better handwriting.
Speaker 4: I did notice this when I was looking through and
Speaker 4: swooning over some field note calligraphy among the vintage egg stacts.
Speaker 4: I mean that font Ay had good handwriting. Yep, I
Speaker 4: wonder do you think he was amateur?
Speaker 5: Do you think he was pro he was an amateur? Really? Yeah,
Speaker 5: all these guys were amateurs. Almost all the egg collecting
Speaker 5: was done by amateurs. That's really amazing.
Speaker 4: Wow, and they call themselves oologists. Yeah, and yet you've
Speaker 4: edited a book about x yep.
Speaker 5: And I'm not calling myself, oh my god, oh yeah,
Speaker 5: just pathologically humble, just beautiful, cursive and things in ways
Speaker 5: that nobody would do today.
Speaker 4: God, we got to get back into that. I feel like,
Speaker 4: you know, because those are the original fonts.
Speaker 5: Maybe they'll make some computer programs that'll do it, and
Speaker 5: I can actually effectively do some of that, but it's
Speaker 5: not going to be me by Handwriting's so funny.
Speaker 4: Field biologists had to take like Fountain pen courses, you know,
Speaker 4: like we got to keep it up, guys.
Speaker 5: There's no doubt that one of the things we should
Speaker 5: do is take printing courses. And I'm exhibit A of
Speaker 5: somebody who is not good at that. And I have
Speaker 5: a immense amount of respect for my colleagues that actually
Speaker 5: write impeccable scientific field notes and labels and things.
Speaker 4: I'm looking at some handwriting you have over here.
Speaker 5: No, I got not bad. I could tell you stories.
Speaker 5: Let us write this for you.
Speaker 4: Ohoa, that's one way to get out of doing work.
Speaker 4: That's like someone asked you to do the dishes, so
Speaker 4: you break a dish. You never get asked to do
Speaker 4: the dishes again, except.
Speaker 5: In this case. It's like, I really wish I could
Speaker 5: do it.
Speaker 4: Well, I can't type, so you can learn to print
Speaker 4: and I'll learn how to type. What do you love
Speaker 4: the most about eggs?
Speaker 5: I mean just that there's such an important part of
Speaker 5: the biology of birds. I think that's the most interesting
Speaker 5: thing to me. And the other thing is that actually,
Speaker 5: with all the birds in this world, and there are
Speaker 5: some ten thousand, eight hundred species, we probably don't know
Speaker 5: anything about the eggs of upwards of thirty to forty
Speaker 5: percent of the species.
Speaker 4: Maybe that's crazy.
Speaker 5: It is kind of interesting, you know. So there's a
Speaker 5: lot we don't know about eggs.
Speaker 4: There's so many mysteries. And what about your job? What's
Speaker 4: your favorite thing about your job?
Speaker 5: Well, my favorite thing about my job is learning new
Speaker 5: things and getting to work with a group of organisms
Speaker 5: that I love and really kind of getting paid for
Speaker 5: my to do my advocation.
Speaker 4: So you're a professional bird nerd. Yeah, absolutely, I mean
Speaker 4: that's the dream for a burder is to be like
Speaker 4: you get that's like making the major leagues.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, you know what I mean. I tell students
Speaker 5: that I you know, I started out wanting to be
Speaker 5: a I was a pre med and I took a
Speaker 5: cell biology course, and I realized somebody might pay me
Speaker 5: to actually study birds the rest of my life.
Speaker 4: So you're like veering off.
Speaker 5: It was. It was an easy veer.
Speaker 4: Now, if you would have told yourself a young birder
Speaker 4: that you would get to do this for a living,
Speaker 4: would you have just been so stoked?
Speaker 5: Yeah? I mean I grew up my dad was a
Speaker 5: bird watcher and a very active birdwatcher, and I actually
Speaker 5: started burning because my brother was four years older, and
Speaker 5: I realized if I wanted to spend any time with
Speaker 5: the two of them, I better learned something about birds.
Speaker 5: So that's how I got interested in it. And I
Speaker 5: just even back then, I fell in love with the
Speaker 5: idea of being able to study birds up close and
Speaker 5: in those you know, in that kind of way.
Speaker 4: And now you get to study them every day yep.
Speaker 4: And things that come out with them the.
Speaker 5: Outside yea, and things that that you know that last
Speaker 5: like that.
Speaker 4: Well, I think that your only job left is to
Speaker 4: come to terms with the fact that you're an oologist.
Speaker 4: I think you need to accept that.
Speaker 5: To see I could put that on my door and
Speaker 5: my cards and stuff. That's just not going to happen.
Speaker 4: There's imposter syndrome is everywhere, Like, I don't know if
Speaker 4: I know enough. And you're like, you wrote a book
Speaker 4: about eggs, what more do you want if you managed
Speaker 4: collection of one hundred thousand eggs?
Speaker 5: But I think that that the notion of yeah, I mean,
Speaker 5: how many ologists can you actually be? So? So at
Speaker 5: what point in time will you answer? You know? Because
Speaker 5: I want to be an ornithologist. I like the fact
Speaker 5: that I study birds.
Speaker 4: Right, you can be more than one. I'm Italian, I'm
Speaker 4: also English, you know what I mean? And you can
Speaker 4: be all kinds of things. So you I mean, I
Speaker 4: live in La everyone's a hyphenate, yoga instructor, actor, life coach.
Speaker 4: So I hereby proclaimed that you're an oologist.
Speaker 5: Fair enough?
Speaker 4: Yay, thank you so much for doing this.
Speaker 5: This was so fun, my pleasure.
Speaker 4: I could ask you a million egg questions all day.
Speaker 5: You'll have to come back and talc you anologist? Which
Speaker 5: is you?
Speaker 4: So once again, doctor John Bates of the Wonderful Field
Speaker 4: Music of Chicago. Now, if you like this podcast and
Speaker 4: the Field Museum, you should definitely check out if you
Speaker 4: haven't already, The Brain Scoop, which is the Field Museum's
Speaker 4: web series hosted by the amazing Emily Grasley. She is
Speaker 4: a wonderful person and a great science communicator, so you
Speaker 4: might enjoy those. Also, those videos are family friendly, so
Speaker 4: you can watch those with your kids all you want.
Speaker 4: Now again, John was an editor alongside Barbara Becker, of
Speaker 4: the Book of Eggs, a life sized guide to the
Speaker 4: eggs of six hundred of the world's bird species, written
Speaker 4: by Mark E. Hauber and available through Chicago University Press.
Speaker 4: Now warning, do you want to say this book is
Speaker 4: gorgeous and if you see it you will want to
Speaker 4: purchase it. Treat you so now while you're at it,
Speaker 4: ologiesmerch dot com has you covered in terms of hats
Speaker 4: and backpacks and tots and sweatshirts, baby onesies. Thank you
Speaker 4: Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis for managing that. Also, I
Speaker 4: hear they may have some back to school type of
Speaker 4: things coming up. They haven't even told me about it yet,
Speaker 4: so stay tuned. Also, thank you to the patrons who
Speaker 4: support the podcast for as little as twenty five cents
Speaker 4: an episode for making this happen. Thanks Hannah and River
Speaker 4: Lippo in Boston and Aaron Talbert for keeping the Facebook
Speaker 4: group Theologies podcast group fun and cool, full of curious
Speaker 4: non jerks. And thanks as always to Dinosaur egg Baby
Speaker 4: Steven Ray Morris for editing ologies all together. Every week.
Speaker 4: The theme song was written and performed by Nick Thorburn
Speaker 4: And at the end of the episode, after the credits,
Speaker 4: you know, I tell a secret, and this week my
Speaker 4: secret is these asides aren't that long, but it has
Speaker 4: taken me almost double the amount of time to record
Speaker 4: them because I keep starting one and then messing up
Speaker 4: a word and having to start over. And I think
Speaker 4: it's because I'm recording this in my closet and it's
Speaker 4: a thousand degrees. But this has been the one of
Speaker 4: probably the most tongue tied episode I've ever had. I
Speaker 4: cannot figure it out. I'm just like, have the thank
Speaker 4: you for making it this far. I am about to
Speaker 4: collapse from heat on my computer. Oh my god, bye
Speaker 4: bye pacodermatology, lombiology or do zoology, lithology and zoology, meteorology, papology, apology, seriology, seology.
Speaker 5: Hey, maybe I hear the blues and call in top
Speaker 5: salad and scrambled eggs, and maybe I seem a bit confused. Yeah, maybe,
Speaker 5: but I got you fagged.
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