Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In today's episode
Speaker 1: is a fault episode. This originally published on July second,
Speaker 1: and it's about eggs. Yeah. I don't remember this one
Speaker 1: at all. Um, maybe listeners do. Sometimes I have very
Speaker 1: fond memories of recording one an episode. Other times, Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It just kind of I have I
Speaker 1: have missing time there. Oh this one was fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was your idea. Yeah, well I'm not I'm not
Speaker 1: doubting that, nor am I doubting that it's a fun episode.
Speaker 1: I just don't remember it at all. All Right, here
Speaker 1: we go. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production
Speaker 1: of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And today we're going to reach into a jar of
Speaker 1: pickled eggs and and see what we pull out. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's right, we are venturing into the egg chamber. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is going to be kind of a potpourri episode. Uh,
Speaker 1: kind of a you know, a salad bar episode with
Speaker 1: with multiple curiosities plucked from the vinegar soaked vat here,
Speaker 1: and if everyone digs it, perhaps will come back and
Speaker 1: explore more topics along this line. But basically, yeah, we're
Speaker 1: talking about eggs, and eggs just in general are pretty amazing,
Speaker 1: even in their most mundane form. Factoring you know, into
Speaker 1: the equation the more familiar examples of reproduction and cuisine,
Speaker 1: you know, I feel like we need to take a
Speaker 1: step back and just consider how weird and wonderful they
Speaker 1: are there in the organic vessel. A means for biology
Speaker 1: to leave one being and then develop into another and
Speaker 1: then burst free of this protective shell or casing that
Speaker 1: has served as its vehicle the egg and way makes
Speaker 1: me think of that quote that we've talked about a
Speaker 1: couple of times that was in Brian Green's book about
Speaker 1: how when we learned to take the water with us
Speaker 1: out of the ocean, that's like how organisms move to land,
Speaker 1: like you know that where water bags slashing around on feet,
Speaker 1: and in a way, the egg is sort of the
Speaker 1: same principle. It takes some of the same sustaining conditions
Speaker 1: from being within the mother's body, outside of the body
Speaker 1: where you can eventually hatch out after you mature enough.
Speaker 1: I like that you brought up the ocean here, because
Speaker 1: we all of course come from the ocean, that is
Speaker 1: the the ultimate origin of of life here on Earth.
Speaker 1: But but in addition to that, we see of course
Speaker 1: primordial oceans factoring into various world mythologies, and we also
Speaker 1: see the idea of an egg featuring prominently in world
Speaker 1: mythologies as well. We see variations of the world egg
Speaker 1: in many different myth cycles, including but not limited to Vedic, Greek, Egyptian,
Speaker 1: and Chinese mythologies, and we can we can easily devote
Speaker 1: an entire episode just to these varied myths, because they're
Speaker 1: all pretty pretty fabulous. The idea of of of the
Speaker 1: universe or some primordial creator being emerging from this egg uh.
Speaker 1: In the Greek tradition, it's known as the and it's
Speaker 1: often depicted as being kind of serpent bound, this orphic
Speaker 1: egg from which the primordial fanniase emerges. Isn't it interesting though,
Speaker 1: the way that the egg is kind of a biological
Speaker 1: Pandora's box to go to another Greek myth, because you
Speaker 1: can't always tell from the external morphology of the egg
Speaker 1: what kind of animal is inside, right right, and certainly
Speaker 1: in the case so we've We've of course talked about
Speaker 1: like various brood parasites in the show before, including avian
Speaker 1: examples like the cuckoo. Uh and, in which case, you know,
Speaker 1: the a mother bird may not be able to tell
Speaker 1: if one of the eggs has been placed into her
Speaker 1: nest by another species, the speaking of mysterious and and
Speaker 1: difficult to identify orbs. Uh So, the idea that made
Speaker 1: us want to do this episode was something that you
Speaker 1: shared with me last week. It was a news article
Speaker 1: about a really interesting fossil find. This was so. The
Speaker 1: article you shared was a June NPR article by Nell
Speaker 1: Greenfield Boice, and it tells the story of how a
Speaker 1: paleontologist from U T. Austin named Julia Clark was visiting
Speaker 1: a colleague named David Rubyl R. Rogers, who works at
Speaker 1: Chile's National Museum of Natural History. And this was back
Speaker 1: in and Ruble R. Rogers apparently wanted Clark's opinion on
Speaker 1: a very strange fossil in his collection, which had been
Speaker 1: found in an Arctico way back in two thousand eleven. Specifically,
Speaker 1: it was on an island off the tip of the
Speaker 1: Antarctic Peninsula called Seymour Island. And Seymour Island has been
Speaker 1: a rich site for fossil excavations for more than a
Speaker 1: hundred years now. I think I've read about fossils being
Speaker 1: found there in the eighteen nineties. But Greenfield Voice describes
Speaker 1: the fossil that these two paleontologists were looking at as
Speaker 1: more than eleven by seven inches, so it's about twenty
Speaker 1: nine by twenty centimeters and of pretty much the exact
Speaker 1: size and appearance of a deflated football, except its stone.
Speaker 1: Now it's it's petrified, it's fossilized, and Ruble R. Rogers
Speaker 1: and his colleagues referred to this object as the thing,
Speaker 1: so you can see why we were intrigued. Absolutely, And
Speaker 1: the images that that that accompanied this article of the
Speaker 1: thing do look very thing ish, uh it is it
Speaker 1: almost almost looks like it's like a withered face, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of like the face of the sorting hat or something,
Speaker 1: or what's that the oogie Boogie creature from the nine
Speaker 1: Are before Christmas. I was thinking exactly that, and I
Speaker 1: think that's a really good point. The comparison to a
Speaker 1: deflated football or this kind of wrinkly oogie boogeyman face
Speaker 1: is really good because when you look at this object,
Speaker 1: even though it is now fully fossilized, is basically it
Speaker 1: is a mineral product. You can immediately see in its
Speaker 1: creases and textures the remnants of what must have been
Speaker 1: some kind of soft, leathery membrane collapsed in on itself. So, yes,
Speaker 1: it's mysterious, Yes it's creepy. It is definitely a thing.
Speaker 1: But what is it? It's just this strange collapsed, deflated orb. Well.
Speaker 1: Upon further analysis, the researchers here figured out that this
Speaker 1: was an egg. It's a fossil of a giant soft
Speaker 1: shelled egg from around sixty eight million years ago, so
Speaker 1: that this would be just towards the ends of the
Speaker 1: Cretaceous period, near the KPg boundary that marks the end
Speaker 1: of the non avian dinosaurs. And the researchers published their
Speaker 1: findings in the journal Nature earlier this month. The article
Speaker 1: was called a giant soft shelled egg from the Late
Speaker 1: Cretaceous of Antarctica, and this is now the largest soft
Speaker 1: shelled egg ever known to exist, and it's uh in
Speaker 1: addition to being the largest soft shelled egg, it's the
Speaker 1: second largest egg of any kind and known to ever exist,
Speaker 1: falling only slightly behind the huge eggs of Madagascar's flightless
Speaker 1: elephant birds, which would extinct sometime in the past few
Speaker 1: hundred years. Yeah, we we discussed them a little bit
Speaker 1: in our MOA episodes, right, But but even that was
Speaker 1: only a little bit bigger than this egg. And the
Speaker 1: author's conclude that this was probably the egg of a
Speaker 1: gigantic marine reptile such as a mosasaur, of which adult
Speaker 1: remains had been found nearby the same fossil beds. So
Speaker 1: you find adult mosasaurs nearby there and around the same layer,
Speaker 1: it seems like this very likely came from a creature
Speaker 1: like that. And on the importance of this find, Greenfield
Speaker 1: voice in her n p R piece, quotes an evolutionary
Speaker 1: biologist from Princeton University named Mary Caswell Stoddard, who says, quote,
Speaker 1: a soft shelled fossil egg like this is a rare gym.
Speaker 1: The lack of soft shelled fossil eggs, which are extremely rare,
Speaker 1: makes it challenging to flesh out a detailed picture of
Speaker 1: egg evolution invertebrates. This discovery helps provide one critical piece
Speaker 1: of the puzzle. So this is important because it gives
Speaker 1: us a look at something that we don't often see
Speaker 1: captured in fossil form, the soft shelled egg, and it
Speaker 1: helps us get a better picture of how exactly eggs
Speaker 1: changed and evolved as dinosaurs evolved over time. Oh and
Speaker 1: real quick, if you if you're out there listening and
Speaker 1: you're like, okay, mossaur, which one is that put it
Speaker 1: in Jurassic Park terms for me? Well, in the movie
Speaker 1: Jurassic World, that's supposed to be a mosasaur in the
Speaker 1: big aquatic part of the park, or the one that
Speaker 1: like eats an executive assistant or something. Yeah. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: really horrible scene in the film where where it sleeps
Speaker 1: up and eats this, uh, this I think otherwise innocent
Speaker 1: character in the film. Yeah, I remember that. That was.
Speaker 1: Well I'm not going to get off on all my
Speaker 1: Jurassic World beefs, but that scene felt totally strange. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I agreed, But still great dinosaur sequence. I just wish
Speaker 1: she had been more of a villain or something. But yeah, So,
Speaker 1: so back to the thing, so that the characteristics of
Speaker 1: this egg are strange. Instead of the hard calcified shells
Speaker 1: that paleontologists used to believe, we're just the norm for dinosaurs. This,
Speaker 1: along with other recent egg finds, for example, from the
Speaker 1: genus Protoceratops and the genus um Moossaris, reveals that many
Speaker 1: dinosaurs and Cretaceous marine reptiles laid eggs that were like
Speaker 1: this that we're pliable and soft like some turtle species
Speaker 1: due today. And it looks like it, just it varied
Speaker 1: according to different groups of dinosaurs. So you would have
Speaker 1: therapod dinosaurs like the t rex and they would lay calcified,
Speaker 1: hard shelled eggs, and you'd have many saua pods or
Speaker 1: hadrosaurs also laying hard shelled, calcified eggs like the ones
Speaker 1: you would imagine from birds or many reptiles that live
Speaker 1: on land today. While you have these their animals like
Speaker 1: probably mosasaurs, probably Protoceratops, laying softer, leathery or eggs. And
Speaker 1: so the question is why would the egg shell be
Speaker 1: so thin and soft. What's the advantage to that. Well,
Speaker 1: one possibility is maybe that's just the way things had
Speaker 1: always been, and they would stay that way unless they
Speaker 1: were driven by specific environmental pressures to become otherwise, to
Speaker 1: harden and calcify. The researchers in this other nature paper
Speaker 1: from this year, the one I mentioned a minute ago.
Speaker 1: It's called it's just called the first dinosaur egg was soft.
Speaker 1: They argued that ancestral dinosaurs probably all laid soft shelled eggs,
Speaker 1: and then over time, over the millions of years, via
Speaker 1: convergent evolution, several different groups of later dinosaurs independently evolved
Speaker 1: the adaptation of hard shelled eggs at least three different
Speaker 1: times that we know of. So there would have been
Speaker 1: just been evolutionary pressure for thicker shells on some of
Speaker 1: these other dinosaurs, but apparently not on this one. Probably
Speaker 1: not on this mosasaur creature. Uh so, So, looking specifically
Speaker 1: at the thing, the authors of that study in Nature
Speaker 1: posits something really interesting about it. They say at the
Speaker 1: end of their abstract quote, such a large egg with
Speaker 1: a relatively thin eggshell may reflect a derived constraints associated
Speaker 1: with body shape, reproductive investment linked with gigantism and lepido
Speaker 1: sarian viviparity, in which a vestigial egg is laid and
Speaker 1: hatches immediately. So we don't know this for sure, but
Speaker 1: what they're saying it looks like here is this was
Speaker 1: very likely a creature that laid an egg, but it
Speaker 1: was almost a sort of egg assisted live birth. So
Speaker 1: you would lay lay a soft, thin, pliable egg and
Speaker 1: then nearly immediately the hatchling would tear out of this
Speaker 1: egg sac and escape, and then the egg would fall
Speaker 1: to the ocean floor and collapse. Yeah. All right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think this this is making sense here because uh
Speaker 1: and you can imagine the world of the mosasaur like
Speaker 1: like all aquatic uh worlds. You know, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: probably not a really peaceful place. So that uh, that creature,
Speaker 1: that that young ling needs to be highly developed and
Speaker 1: just ready to burst out and go, not to sink
Speaker 1: to the bottom of the muck. Yeah. And this level
Speaker 1: of maturity at the time of hatching is a theme
Speaker 1: that will come back to a few other times here. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In fact, our our next example of curious eggs from
Speaker 1: the natural world gets into this a little bit. I
Speaker 1: want to talk about the eggs of the volcano birds. Good. So,
Speaker 1: uh specifically we're going to be talking about the Malayo
Speaker 1: birds of the You'll find them on the Indonesian island
Speaker 1: of Sulawesi, uh and then there's a smaller island named
Speaker 1: Bhutan where you'll also find them. Uh And uh Sulawesi
Speaker 1: is one of the four Greater Sunda Islands, actually the
Speaker 1: world's eleventh largest island. I believe listeners might remember us
Speaker 1: from discussing this in the recent episode about archaeological finds there.
Speaker 1: It may push back the earliest date for known examples
Speaker 1: of hunting scenes and prehistoric art. Oh. Yeah, and there
Speaker 1: was also a question I think about whether the same
Speaker 1: cave artwork in Indonesia depicted theory and thropes right, the
Speaker 1: idea of of UH theeomorphic or animal form humans, and
Speaker 1: if so, whether that would push back the earliest physical
Speaker 1: evidence we have of fantasy thinking or supernatural magical thinking
Speaker 1: in humans. Yeah, so, as far as I know, that's
Speaker 1: still kind of an open question. More research remains to
Speaker 1: be UH conducted. But it's certainly exciting. But also the
Speaker 1: Malayo bird is rather exciting. I was not familiar with
Speaker 1: this creature until very recently, but basically it's a it's
Speaker 1: a chicken sized bird and we had and of course
Speaker 1: it lays eggs. And one of the important jobs of
Speaker 1: an egg layer is of course UH to provide for
Speaker 1: the eggs incubation. Now, in some cases an egg UH
Speaker 1: may basically be ready to go, like we said, the
Speaker 1: and it comes out. But then other times the egg
Speaker 1: needs to uh be cared for, it needs to be
Speaker 1: incubated a bit longer. And in many cases, you know,
Speaker 1: a bird is just going to use their own body
Speaker 1: to incubate the egg. This is the classic scenario of
Speaker 1: a chicken, um uh you know land laying on its eggs.
Speaker 1: The example of penguins keeping their eggs warm, uh you know,
Speaker 1: by their feet, that sort of thing. It's a good
Speaker 1: energy move because I mean, you've got extra body heat
Speaker 1: coming off of you, whether you want that or not.
Speaker 1: Why not put it to use exactly? And then it
Speaker 1: also opens up the door for various uh additional strategies
Speaker 1: such as again the cuckoo's brood parasites that don't actually
Speaker 1: incubate the egg further themselves, but have another bird another
Speaker 1: species do it through a mix of mimicry and or
Speaker 1: threats of violence. But then there are also there are
Speaker 1: sort of environmental engineers animals that use the environment meant
Speaker 1: that build structures of some kind to help them incubate
Speaker 1: eggs without having to make a personal time commitment of
Speaker 1: just sitting on it the whole time. That's right, I
Speaker 1: mean it's almost it's almost as if the bird would
Speaker 1: think back, It's like, all right, what am I doing
Speaker 1: Here'm providing heat? Where else can I get heat? Um? So,
Speaker 1: like in Australia, you see the example of the bush turkey,
Speaker 1: which actually builds a compost pile that incubates the eggs
Speaker 1: via the heat of microbial decay. Oh yeah, these things
Speaker 1: are great. I think some listeners in Australia have actually
Speaker 1: talked to us about them before, regarding them somewhat as
Speaker 1: pests for making giant mounds in their yard and things
Speaker 1: like this. But uh, but yeah, the the bush turkey
Speaker 1: or brush turkey, these are examples of these megapode birds,
Speaker 1: uh that that are they're sort of like the beavers
Speaker 1: of the bird world. Yeah. And uh, you know, if
Speaker 1: you if anyone out there, if you, if you like
Speaker 1: like me, if you have a compost, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: spinner that sort of thing, you'll notice it does heat
Speaker 1: up in there. You know, there's a lot of acting
Speaker 1: of it going on inside the compost. When my son
Speaker 1: was younger, he would call it the hot hot machine.
Speaker 1: And indeed that's what the bush turkey has done here,
Speaker 1: is that it creates its own hot, hot machine to
Speaker 1: incubate the eggs. Yeah. So it makes a big compost
Speaker 1: pile out of litter and leaf litter and things like
Speaker 1: that that I've read. I think sometimes that they can
Speaker 1: be as big as a car. Like these piles can
Speaker 1: be huge. Yeah, their size, well, I can see why
Speaker 1: it could be in some cases considered a pest because
Speaker 1: it just creates a big old heap. But you know what,
Speaker 1: if you've got a heap in your yard, don't be ashamed.
Speaker 1: Don't be embarrassed. Be proud of your heat pointed out
Speaker 1: to your neighbors, say, check out that heap. That's really cool.
Speaker 1: It's hot. It's the hot hot heat. Yeah. Alright, So
Speaker 1: let's get back to the Malayo bird here um, which
Speaker 1: which also has a cool pair of solutions to this problem.
Speaker 1: It depends on one of two options for the incubation
Speaker 1: of its eggs. Either by burying its eggs in solar
Speaker 1: heated sands. So there's some hot sand over here, I'll
Speaker 1: put my eggs in there. Solar power will do the
Speaker 1: rest or. And this is the exciting part, burying them
Speaker 1: in geothermally heated volcanic soils hot sands adjacent to volcanic events. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a strategy on the edge that that that bird
Speaker 1: is living on the edge. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: pretty amazing. There's a wonderful some wonderful footage of this
Speaker 1: as well, and it's just it's almost phoenix like this
Speaker 1: idea right of of of the the egg being deposited
Speaker 1: in the of volcanically heated ground and then it emerges.
Speaker 1: Um by the way that the maleos egg is roughly
Speaker 1: watermelon shaped. And I was reading in a two thousand
Speaker 1: seventeen study from Princeton University that was doing like kind
Speaker 1: of an overall uh you know, catalog ng of egg
Speaker 1: sizes and game characteristics. They point out that it is
Speaker 1: the most elliptical of all Avian eggs. And the idea
Speaker 1: here is that the bird may have evolved to become
Speaker 1: a skillful flyer, and it's egg may also have evolved
Speaker 1: this way to accommodate a streamlined body that is built
Speaker 1: for instantaneous flight. Now, wait a minute, would that mean
Speaker 1: the egg was shaped to accommodate the body of the
Speaker 1: of the embryo inside it or of the mother that's
Speaker 1: carrying it before it is laid. Um, my, interpretation. My
Speaker 1: understanding is that we're dealing more with the chick because
Speaker 1: the chick when it when it hatches, needs to be
Speaker 1: ready to go, because the whole idea of letting a
Speaker 1: volcano incubate your eggs letting a volcano raise your children
Speaker 1: is that you don't have to do anything. When the
Speaker 1: egg hatches, the mother malao is long gone. So yeah,
Speaker 1: so the the young male the malayo chick, hatches and
Speaker 1: is on its own and ready to fly almost immediately.
Speaker 1: And this is actually a very special feature of megapode
Speaker 1: birds generally, the megapode. I was just wondering, Actually, everybody
Speaker 1: I've heard pronounced this word says megapodes, But then I
Speaker 1: was thinking about the antipodies, and I was like, it
Speaker 1: isn't megapades but words. But no, I think it's megapoets anyway. Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, these other birds, like the bush turkey, are
Speaker 1: famous for having young that are extremely quick to adapt
Speaker 1: to life, like immediately after hatching. They can run around,
Speaker 1: they can hunt, they can fly on a dime. All right,
Speaker 1: on that note, we're going to take a quick break,
Speaker 1: but we'll be right back with more eggs. Thank Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, So what's next in the egg chamber here, Joe, Well, Robert,
Speaker 1: as soon as you suggested the idea of doing an
Speaker 1: episode on eggs, my mind instantly filled with thoughts of
Speaker 1: Ridley Scott's Alien because I think, you know, we come
Speaker 1: back to this text quite a bit, and I think
Speaker 1: of John Hurt descending into an enclosed pit of these
Speaker 1: leathery orbs, and then he comes in closer to get
Speaker 1: a better look at one, and one of the eggs
Speaker 1: nearby starts to throb, and it's flaps peel back, and
Speaker 1: of course we all know what happens next, right, the
Speaker 1: parasite and just leaps out, attaches itself to its to
Speaker 1: his face, mobilizes him, and begins putting some kind of
Speaker 1: alien pupa in his body. So in Alien, we're presented
Speaker 1: with the vision of a sort of predatory egg or
Speaker 1: ambush egg, and an egg which opens to unleash a
Speaker 1: parasite that requires no additional maturation outside the egg before
Speaker 1: it is lethal. And that made me wonder, is there
Speaker 1: anything like a predatory egg in the natural world? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because this is, of course the most famous example is
Speaker 1: Alien BC. Versions of this throughout science fiction, influenced by alien,
Speaker 1: where there's some sort of horrible egg and yeah, you
Speaker 1: look at it wrong and it will open and get you,
Speaker 1: or you know, open and dix. It exudes some sort
Speaker 1: of a parasite that will creep up on you and
Speaker 1: get you. Yeah. Now I couldn't find anything exactly like alien,
Speaker 1: but there are some pretty close parallels. In fact, things
Speaker 1: we've already talked about a good bit on the podcast,
Speaker 1: so we're not going to linger on too much, but
Speaker 1: I want to go in a few directions with this.
Speaker 1: One is just to talk about an interesting distinction in
Speaker 1: zoology that we've already been coming up against the border
Speaker 1: of and that's the relevant distinction between altriciality and precociality
Speaker 1: and animals. So, think of the hatchlings of a songbird,
Speaker 1: like like a sparrow, you know, the passive forms. Here
Speaker 1: the sparrow, once it emerges from an egg, it is helpless.
Speaker 1: It could not survive on its own. It lacks the
Speaker 1: ability to fly, and I'm not sure if it even
Speaker 1: lacks the ability to walk really, I mean, it can't
Speaker 1: move around much by itself. It certainly can't forage for itself.
Speaker 1: Once it hatches. The sparrow hatchling sits in the nest
Speaker 1: waiting to be brought food while it matures, and there
Speaker 1: there are many animals that are like this, you know,
Speaker 1: upon whether it's hatching from an egg or live birth.
Speaker 1: Upon being born, they can't really do much for themselves.
Speaker 1: They certainly can't move around much, and a species like
Speaker 1: this would be called altricial, meaning it's young or relatively helpless,
Speaker 1: unable to move around by themselves for a long time
Speaker 1: after they're born or hatched. The opposite of altriciality is
Speaker 1: known as precociality, and this is from the same root
Speaker 1: word is precocious, a word that often gets applied to
Speaker 1: like creepily mature human children. Yes, when there's the little
Speaker 1: boy who speaks like an adult man and you know,
Speaker 1: quite surely temple is is often an example of this. Uh.
Speaker 1: A precocial species is one that matures and is able
Speaker 1: to move around on its own and finn for itself
Speaker 1: relatively soon after being born or hatched. I think the
Speaker 1: most common metric used to measure this distinction is a
Speaker 1: movement like how much can this animal you know do
Speaker 1: its own locomotion? And there are some animals that take
Speaker 1: precociality to the extreme, and these are known as super
Speaker 1: precocial animals. A very commonly cited example is exactly what
Speaker 1: we've been talking about already, megapode birds. Of course, the
Speaker 1: megapodes include the malayo bird that you were just talking about.
Speaker 1: They include the mound builder birds like the brush turkeys
Speaker 1: or the bush turkeys, and obviously not all of them
Speaker 1: are exactly the same, but megapodes generally, you're going to
Speaker 1: see that once they hatch, they're able to see. They're
Speaker 1: not born blind. They can see, they can walk, they
Speaker 1: can run, they can hunt, they can fly pretty much
Speaker 1: on the same day that they emerge from their eggs,
Speaker 1: and that that's pretty amazing. Yeah, it really throws a
Speaker 1: lot of our, especially um human centric ideas about about
Speaker 1: birth and um and and and maturity right out the
Speaker 1: window totally, because obviously humans are relatively altricial, right um.
Speaker 1: But by this metric, the xenomorp face hugger from Alien
Speaker 1: would be an example of super precociality, right. It's taken
Speaker 1: to the logical extreme. It's a parasite that that only
Speaker 1: needs one host and it is ready to attack that
Speaker 1: hosts literally the moment it emerges from its eggs, so
Speaker 1: it's already hunting within seconds of of cracking out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and of course we could easily do the whole podcasts
Speaker 1: about like each each faces in the life cycle of
Speaker 1: the zeno morph But you know, I was just thinking,
Speaker 1: it's like, in a way, is the face hugger that
Speaker 1: emerges from the egg, Like that seems to be like
Speaker 1: the the actual organism itself, right, Uh, depending on how
Speaker 1: you interpret it, Well, yeah, it's interesting. It's it's a
Speaker 1: it's a creature with a life cycle that's got two
Speaker 1: completely morphologically different stages that are that are you know,
Speaker 1: like trophically staggered. So one life cycle gives rise to
Speaker 1: the next life cycle. But they're not the like, you know,
Speaker 1: adults do not emerge from the egg. The face hugger
Speaker 1: emerges from the egg, and then it finds a human.
Speaker 1: It implants in the human the I guess there's a
Speaker 1: pupa that just states there and then that becomes the adult.
Speaker 1: So yeah, depending on how you look at it, the
Speaker 1: face hugger could be considered like the the the purest
Speaker 1: form of the organism before it ends up taking on
Speaker 1: properties of the the host organism. Oh, I see Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but by that count as well. I've also seen interpretations
Speaker 1: that the say, well, the face hugger is essentially like
Speaker 1: a mobile sex organ like, it's not it's it's not
Speaker 1: the organism itself, it is a precursor to it um.
Speaker 1: And then ultimately the whole life cycle is so suitably
Speaker 1: alien that it doesn't completely line up with with even
Speaker 1: some of the elaborate life cycles that we see here
Speaker 1: on Earth, and we do have some really elaborate ones. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I would say of all the life cycles that
Speaker 1: we see on Earth, I think probably the one that
Speaker 1: the alien creature is the closest to is something we've
Speaker 1: actually talked about a good bit on the show before.
Speaker 1: So we're not going to rehash everything here, but just
Speaker 1: real quickly. Parasitoid wasps um so parasitoid wasps you know,
Speaker 1: there are different well actually you could just say parasitoids
Speaker 1: in general, but the parasitoid wasp the hymenoptera in parasitoids
Speaker 1: are a really good example where what they will often
Speaker 1: do is they will find a host organism such as
Speaker 1: a tarantula or something like that they will immobilize it,
Speaker 1: so they injected with a parallel rising venom, seal it
Speaker 1: up some way with their eggs, either the eggs planted
Speaker 1: on it or near it, and then when the eggs hatch,
Speaker 1: they consume this animal, this like spider or whatever it is,
Speaker 1: alive from the inside out as they mature towards their
Speaker 1: adult stage. I mean, that's that's pretty dang close to
Speaker 1: exactly what goes on with the enomorph right. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: And in many cases it's even more amazing than that,
Speaker 1: because you get into these examples of the of the
Speaker 1: of the parasitoid wasp altering the behavior of the host organism.
Speaker 1: It gets uh yeah, it's certainly a case where nature
Speaker 1: um at least equals but I think probably exceeds, uh
Speaker 1: just the complexity of the xenomoreph scenario, or at least
Speaker 1: in this case. Yeah, I guess it's a it's a
Speaker 1: cliche for us at this point, but nature is stranger
Speaker 1: than fiction. You can't make this stuff up. Yeah, But
Speaker 1: to explore some more new territory, I was wondering about
Speaker 1: the idea of being attacked by an egg itself. Is
Speaker 1: there such a thing as a real like predatory egg,
Speaker 1: not just what comes out of the egg and I
Speaker 1: couldn't find anything directly like this, Like you know, I
Speaker 1: was looking for something like a you know, an animal
Speaker 1: that like mimics an egg, like an egg mimic decoy
Speaker 1: that attacks I don't know when you come up on
Speaker 1: it or something. I couldn't find anything exactly like that.
Speaker 1: If if you know of examples out there that I
Speaker 1: couldn't find, please email make us aware. But you mean
Speaker 1: like a creature that pretends to be an egg and
Speaker 1: then would prey upon something that eats eggs. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what I mean. Do what do you know of
Speaker 1: something like that? Um? No, I don't know. I think
Speaker 1: there's some sort of robot in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, right,
Speaker 1: don't they have some robots that look like eggs? I
Speaker 1: don't know, but if they were turtle eggs, they may
Speaker 1: very well be soft and leathery shelled instead of hard shelled. Oh.
Speaker 1: We have just received an update from our producer Seth,
Speaker 1: who has been uh digging into old episodes of Teenage
Speaker 1: Muting Ninja Turtles, and he informs us that I am
Speaker 1: thinking of the mouse or robots which are not I
Speaker 1: think supposed to be eggs, but do look sort of
Speaker 1: egg like, So it's just kind of a coincidence of
Speaker 1: their design. Yeah. I think Seth told us recently that
Speaker 1: he's made it to season forty six of the Team
Speaker 1: Ninja Turtles cartoon. So so best of luck to a
Speaker 1: Seth on your on your turtle journey. Um, but but
Speaker 1: I want to bring it back. Okay, So, in terms
Speaker 1: of being injured or attacked by an egg itself, I
Speaker 1: did find something. It wasn't active deliberate violence by an egg,
Speaker 1: but I did find something here. So I was reading
Speaker 1: an article in the New York Times from December seen
Speaker 1: by very Nique Greenwood, which was based in part on
Speaker 1: a series of findings by a couple of acoustics experts
Speaker 1: named Anthony Nash and Lauren von Blonde, who at the
Speaker 1: time worked at an acoustics firm that was called Charles M.
Speaker 1: Salter and Associates. Now, what would acoustics experts have to
Speaker 1: do with eggs? Well, their research, which was presented in
Speaker 1: our December at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in
Speaker 1: New Orleans, concerned the physical properties, especially the loudness, of
Speaker 1: exploding eggs. Now we're again, we're just talking about regular
Speaker 1: chicken eggs here, no gegaresque, insect trapped mine eggs or
Speaker 1: anything like that. Uh Nash and von Blonde had been
Speaker 1: hired as expert witnesses for the defense in a recent lawsuit. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: I don't think the real names of the plaintiff, for
Speaker 1: the defendant, or the location wherever published. I think that
Speaker 1: stuff remains confidential, so we only know about it from
Speaker 1: their research and the reporting on that research where the
Speaker 1: details were anonymized. Uh And I think the case was
Speaker 1: eventually settled out of court, so it may remain a
Speaker 1: mystery forever, but in broad anonymous outline the alleged facts
Speaker 1: of the case. Whereas follows, plaintiff walks into a restaurant,
Speaker 1: he orders a hard boiled egg. I'm assuming he ordered
Speaker 1: some other stuff too. That would be a pretty strange
Speaker 1: thing to order to restaurant by itself, but the egg
Speaker 1: is the important part here. They bring him his hard
Speaker 1: boiled egg. He bites into the egg. Upon being pierced
Speaker 1: by the plaintiff's teeth, the egg explodes, as in, it
Speaker 1: literally explodes, resulting in what the plane have claimed were
Speaker 1: severe burns and actual hearing damage from the volume of
Speaker 1: the explosion. Now, when I first read that, I was like,
Speaker 1: what could could that be real? I'm having a hard
Speaker 1: time imagining it that that really happened. But you can
Speaker 1: use the old YouTube and see for yourself. Unless there
Speaker 1: are a bunch of like coordinated egg explosion hoaxers all
Speaker 1: doing homebrew video manipulation or special effects, exploding eggs are
Speaker 1: absolutely a thing, uh, and they they can actually be
Speaker 1: done very easily if you involve one crucial piece of technology,
Speaker 1: and that is the microwave oven. But of course, yeah,
Speaker 1: so perhaps you yourself have at some point tried to
Speaker 1: cook a whole intact egg shell on inside a microwave,
Speaker 1: and if so, I would not be surprised if you
Speaker 1: have detonated an egg bomb yourself in this way. Microwaving
Speaker 1: a whole egg often results in a big pop and
Speaker 1: a gooey mess, but sometimes a microwaved egg, especially a
Speaker 1: microwave reheating of a previously hard boiled egg, can result
Speaker 1: in an egg that holds together through the cooking. So
Speaker 1: you can microwave it for however long you take it
Speaker 1: out of the microwave, But if you disturb it in
Speaker 1: just the wrong way, say by piercing it, with a
Speaker 1: fork or with your teeth. It suddenly explodes with a
Speaker 1: with a pop, a real like loud sound like a firecracker.
Speaker 1: An egg hot egg pieces go everywhere. And we know
Speaker 1: this is possible just from publicly available video evidence. People
Speaker 1: are you know, messing around with this in their houses
Speaker 1: all the time, apparently, But how often does this happen,
Speaker 1: what are the physics underlying it, and how dangerous is it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean, obviously it makes sense that an egg
Speaker 1: could pop. You know, you could have us you're built
Speaker 1: up in there. In fact, really we use an egg
Speaker 1: cooker in the house a lot. And they had that
Speaker 1: spike in the middle that you're supposed to use to
Speaker 1: to to make a hole in the shell of the
Speaker 1: egg before you cook it, which you know, I always
Speaker 1: assumed was to keep it from bursting or or even exploding. Now,
Speaker 1: I was surprised about the idea that it could allegedly
Speaker 1: cause hearing damage. The idea of a bursting egg, I
Speaker 1: would imagine it would be just kind of a you know,
Speaker 1: a popping situation. Right. The hearing damage was alleged by
Speaker 1: the plaintiff, and we'll we'll try to get to the
Speaker 1: bottom of that. But um, so what was what did
Speaker 1: their research consists of when they're looking into this national
Speaker 1: Von Bland's research first tested actual eggs using the same
Speaker 1: reheating method that was supposedly employed by the restaurant that
Speaker 1: was the defendant in the lawsuit. So you would take
Speaker 1: a previously hard boiled egg and you'd reheat it by
Speaker 1: microwaving it for three minutes in a water bath. Now,
Speaker 1: the researchers here did mint that after several explosions coated
Speaker 1: the inside of the microwave with egg gunk, they realized
Speaker 1: they needed some kind of permeable containment device, so they
Speaker 1: came up with the addition of like a nylon stocking
Speaker 1: type casement for the egg. But with this in place,
Speaker 1: they repeated the experiment with about a hundred eggs, taking
Speaker 1: the temperature of the water bath and taking the temperature
Speaker 1: of the egg itself each time by piercing it with
Speaker 1: a meat thermometer. And when the eggs were done microwaving
Speaker 1: they did the piercing, they would take it out, put
Speaker 1: it on the floor and stabbed the probe of the
Speaker 1: meat thermometer in to take the internal temperature and to
Speaker 1: see if piercing the egg would cause it to explode.
Speaker 1: And what they found was that some eggs did nothing,
Speaker 1: some exploded inside the microwave while cooking. But of the
Speaker 1: one hundred eggs roughly, they found about one third survived
Speaker 1: the reheating itself, only to explode on the outside of
Speaker 1: the microwave once poked with the thermometer. So I think
Speaker 1: it's pretty conclusive the explosion thing, whether you like, rupturing
Speaker 1: a microwave heated hard boiled egg, absolutely can cause it
Speaker 1: to blow up. That just happens, and it looks like
Speaker 1: it happens roughly about one third of the time. But
Speaker 1: of the ones that did explode, the loudness of the
Speaker 1: explosion at its peak was between eighty six and a
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty three decibles at a distance of twelve
Speaker 1: inches from the egg, and Nash compared this too at
Speaker 1: the upper end the hundred and thirty three disciples. He
Speaker 1: compared it to the loudness of something like a chainsaw,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, loud, but not usually a source
Speaker 1: of hearing damage on a on a short time of
Speaker 1: exposure on its own, and based on this reasoning, Nash
Speaker 1: claimed that actual hearing damage from an exploding egg was
Speaker 1: not impossible, but that it was unlikely. Though at the
Speaker 1: same time, I think it is worth noting that these
Speaker 1: scientists were hired by the defense in the trial to
Speaker 1: be expert witnesses for that side, so not not impugning
Speaker 1: their reputation, but it is worth noting the interests involved. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we might need to take this particular eggs to
Speaker 1: with a grain of salt, maybe a little pepper, a
Speaker 1: little mustard if wely some gherkins. Definitely so. But realistically,
Speaker 1: I guess it sounds like it would be loud enough
Speaker 1: that if you just heard exploding eggs all day, it
Speaker 1: could hurt your hearing. But maybe not just one going off.
Speaker 1: That could be the case. Then again, I mean we
Speaker 1: don't know for sure. I mean, like it's possitively that
Speaker 1: they didn't rule out the possibility that there could there
Speaker 1: could be hearing damage in some kind of outside case here,
Speaker 1: but the standard, the average loudness of the explosion they
Speaker 1: thought probably would not hurt your ears if it just
Speaker 1: happened one time. But then but that's not to say
Speaker 1: this is fine. I mean, you would not want to
Speaker 1: bite into one of these eggs. I think burns are
Speaker 1: obviously why that could happen, and just generally, anything exploding
Speaker 1: inside your mouth, I'd imagine even could just probably startle
Speaker 1: you enough that you might get whiplash or something like that.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's biting into something that explodes as a
Speaker 1: horrifying idea. Yeah, and I do want to drive home here.
Speaker 1: If you're out there and you're listening to this, and
Speaker 1: maybe you're stuck in your house and you're a little
Speaker 1: bit bored, do not experiment with exploding eggs just you know,
Speaker 1: have an egg for breakfast maybe and think about this,
Speaker 1: But you don't try and make eggs explode just because
Speaker 1: you heard about it on this show, right, uh and
Speaker 1: and and so there's a more interesting question, though we
Speaker 1: still haven't solved, which is why would the eggs explode
Speaker 1: at all? You can kind of imagine, like, okay, the heating,
Speaker 1: the build up of pressure and steam as could cause
Speaker 1: it to explode while it's cooking inside the microwave. Why
Speaker 1: is it that there's this pattern where about a third
Speaker 1: of the eggs that they tested out here didn't explode
Speaker 1: while cooking, but did explode once you poked them with something.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, it would seem like they would reach
Speaker 1: the because again coming back to my experience using an
Speaker 1: egg cooker, is Okay, we poked the hole on the
Speaker 1: top of the egg with the spike so that it
Speaker 1: doesn't rupture, I guess, and then some of the time, uh,
Speaker 1: you see, egg content has been pushed up through the
Speaker 1: hole that we created, and other times it is not.
Speaker 1: So maybe and I've never analyzed it enough to say
Speaker 1: that it's happening a third at the time or whatnot.
Speaker 1: But maybe that's that's what we're talking about here. The
Speaker 1: same situation could be now So. One thing found by
Speaker 1: Nash and von Blonde was that when they measured the
Speaker 1: temperature of the water bath that the egg was sitting
Speaker 1: in while it was microwaved, and then compared that to
Speaker 1: the temperature inside the egg, specifically of the yolk, there
Speaker 1: was a big difference. Of course, the water bath was
Speaker 1: limited to two d and twelve degrees fahrenheit or one
Speaker 1: hundred degrees celsius. This is the boiling point of water.
Speaker 1: We know that, you know, at that temperature, water doesn't
Speaker 1: really heat up beyond that because it equalizes with the
Speaker 1: you know, with the vapor pressure around it. So so
Speaker 1: additional energy put into it goes into boiling off more
Speaker 1: and more of the water into steam. But the yolk
Speaker 1: was significantly hotter than the boiling point of water. It
Speaker 1: was there was an average of twenty two degrees fahrenheit
Speaker 1: of difference between the water and the yolk. And yet
Speaker 1: the yolk has a significant amount of water in it.
Speaker 1: By some estimates, that chicken egg yolk is it's something
Speaker 1: like fifty water, Okay, now, yeah, yeah, well, of course
Speaker 1: in addition to lots of proteins and fats and stuff.
Speaker 1: And so Nash's hypothesis about the explosion is that the
Speaker 1: microwave process, microwaving process somehow superheats little pockets of water
Speaker 1: inside the egg yolk beyond the boiling point of water. Now,
Speaker 1: there can be a couple of ways that water becomes
Speaker 1: superheated and then flashes suddenly into steam. One way is
Speaker 1: when water is heated in a microwave with an absence
Speaker 1: of what are called nucleation points. Nucleation sites are just
Speaker 1: little places where bubbles can form naturally that allow the
Speaker 1: water to begin to convert into steam. Uh. And this
Speaker 1: is why you might have been advised to put a
Speaker 1: little wooden coffee stir or something like that in a
Speaker 1: mug of water if you're heating it in the microwave.
Speaker 1: There have been occasions where people have gotten burns by
Speaker 1: microwaving water, especially in very smooth, clean containers. And I've
Speaker 1: read also especially when you repeatedly microwave the same container
Speaker 1: of water without like stirring it or touching it. There
Speaker 1: can be cases where the water just gets hotter and hotter,
Speaker 1: but it can't boil because there are no sites where
Speaker 1: this hot mass of water is able to start forming bubbles.
Speaker 1: And in these cases, the water can become hotter than
Speaker 1: its boiling point, but it looks perfectly calm until it's
Speaker 1: disturbed in some way that suddenly does provide nucleation points. Uh.
Speaker 1: This could include jostling the container, inserting a spoon or
Speaker 1: sugar or something like that. The superheated water can then
Speaker 1: quite suddenly flash into steam and explode. But another way
Speaker 1: that water can become superheated and flash suddenly into steam
Speaker 1: is changes in pressure. Uh. You know, remember the principles
Speaker 1: illustrated by a pressure cooker. The normal boiling point of
Speaker 1: water is determined by atmospheric pressure, so you can actually
Speaker 1: change the boiling point of water just by going up
Speaker 1: or down in altitude. If you go higher in altitude
Speaker 1: up a mountain, water converts into vapor easier at a
Speaker 1: lower temperature, and this lowers the boiling point of water,
Speaker 1: so a boiling pot of water on top of a
Speaker 1: mountain will be cooler than a boiling point of water
Speaker 1: at sea level. In fact, there are even stories, I
Speaker 1: think we've talked about these in a previous episode, uh,
Speaker 1: stories of people trying to cook at super high altitudes
Speaker 1: and being unable to do it, Like mountain climbers on
Speaker 1: Everest have sometimes found that you cannot, for example, boil
Speaker 1: potatoes effectively at the top of Everest because at some
Speaker 1: point you get so high up and the pressure is
Speaker 1: so low that the boiling point of water gets so
Speaker 1: low that a pot of water on a burner literally
Speaker 1: just can't get hot enough to cook potatoes, and a
Speaker 1: reasonable amount of time your your water is boiling, but
Speaker 1: it's just not very hot. Conversely, if you increase the
Speaker 1: pressure on a cooking vessel by healing it tight with
Speaker 1: the lid and safety gasket and all that, you can
Speaker 1: actually raise the boiling point of water, allowing water to
Speaker 1: get a lot hotter than it ever would in a
Speaker 1: pot on the stove where it can just evaporate normally,
Speaker 1: and this cooks your food faster. This is the principle
Speaker 1: behind a pressure cooker. Modern pressure cookers tend to be
Speaker 1: very safe by design, but they years ago, pressure cookers
Speaker 1: used to have a reputation for exploding. This was the
Speaker 1: thing people were afraid about, and there are cases of
Speaker 1: this happening. You can see why they could be dangerous
Speaker 1: in principle, because it's contents under pressure, and it's a
Speaker 1: bunch of superheated water. If suddenly exposed to reduced pressure,
Speaker 1: that water would try to convert from liquid water into
Speaker 1: steam really suddenly in a kind of explosive instant. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I remember growing up and hearing about like the canning
Speaker 1: process in which one would put uh you know, their
Speaker 1: jars into a pressure cooker to to sterilize them. I
Speaker 1: remember there being accounts of this which sounded dang triss.
Speaker 1: It sounded explosive to me. Um, I don't know to
Speaker 1: what extent there was actually, Yeah, some sort of cautionary
Speaker 1: tail involved in the telling of it, But but I
Speaker 1: got the sense that the cooking with a with a
Speaker 1: pressure cooker had had some sort of inherent danger to it.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are natural dangers of like burns and
Speaker 1: stuff if you don't have a modern pressure cooker with
Speaker 1: good safety features. But I think modern pressure cookers, like
Speaker 1: if it's made by a reputable company and all that,
Speaker 1: it's going to have safety features in place that make
Speaker 1: it pretty darn safety use. Oh yeah, like like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we use one all the time for various uh you know,
Speaker 1: rice dishes and whatnot. Great for lentils. Yeah. But anyway,
Speaker 1: So so back to the pressure issue. I think this
Speaker 1: is what Anthony Nash is sort of hypothesizing is happening
Speaker 1: inside the yolk of an exploding egg. While an egg
Speaker 1: is being microwaved, It's got this protein matrix inside the
Speaker 1: yolk that becomes hotter than the boiling point of water,
Speaker 1: and this protein matrix is holding all these little pockets
Speaker 1: of water trapped inside. These pockets of water become superheated
Speaker 1: beyond the boiling point of water, and when the egg
Speaker 1: is pierced, these little pockets of superheated liquid water can
Speaker 1: suddenly boil. They flash into steam very rapidly, causing the
Speaker 1: egg to explode in the process. Now, I don't know
Speaker 1: if Nash's hypothesis about the cause of the exploding eggs
Speaker 1: is correct. I can't judge for sure, but it seems
Speaker 1: pretty plausible to me. Uh And I think it's a
Speaker 1: pretty clear indication that microwaving hard boiled eggs is not
Speaker 1: a very good idea. You know, if you've got cold,
Speaker 1: hard boiled eggs, why not just eat them cold or
Speaker 1: make egg salad? Yeah, yeah, don't risk the explosion. You know. However,
Speaker 1: all this talk, okay, we're talking about the pressure inside
Speaker 1: the egg and changes to to to the pressure and
Speaker 1: atmospheric pressure. It does make me wonder, Okay, could you
Speaker 1: have a scenario where you say, venturing aboard a drylic
Speaker 1: spaceship and dur encountering the eggs of another species? Who knows,
Speaker 1: like under what atmospheric conditions they were originally um lane
Speaker 1: point yeah yeah. And and then and then what happened,
Speaker 1: you know, where they put on a ship with an
Speaker 1: entirely different pressure and then maybe that pressure went away,
Speaker 1: maybe the people now discovering it bring it back to
Speaker 1: their ship and there's a different uh air pressure scenario
Speaker 1: going on. Could you end up with an explosive alien
Speaker 1: egg along those lines. I'm gonna rule it physically plausible
Speaker 1: but unproven. Okay, alright, Well, on that note, we're going
Speaker 1: to take one more break, but when we come back,
Speaker 1: we have a couple of more eggs for you. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, Robert. Is it time to pet the furry egg? Yes,
Speaker 1: let us consider the furry egg. So, uh, my, my family,
Speaker 1: like a lot of households out there, recently enjoyed viewing
Speaker 1: the excellent series The Mandalorian, which features everything I love
Speaker 1: about Star Wars, including some really cool creatures and one
Speaker 1: of the most important in the series. This is creature
Speaker 1: that that p up called a mud horn. And it's
Speaker 1: this a large mammalian creature, or assume we assume it
Speaker 1: to be mammalian. Uh. That looks a lot like a
Speaker 1: wooly rhino. It's like an alien take on a wooly rhino.
Speaker 1: And as its name implies, it makes its home in
Speaker 1: the mud. Here it lays a very unique furry egg. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this, by the way, is on the world our
Speaker 1: Volla seven end. And it's here that Jawa's consider it
Speaker 1: a delicacy. So of course our main character ends up
Speaker 1: being sent on a quest to obtain the furry egg. Okay,
Speaker 1: I still haven't seen this, but this sounds good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well you're in for a treat with this one. I know,
Speaker 1: Baby Yoda. So we've got we've got furry eggs and
Speaker 1: baby Yoda. What are they just trying to like cute
Speaker 1: you to death? Well, I mean, I think cute is
Speaker 1: an important part of Star Wars. You gotta have a
Speaker 1: cute element in there. And I think I think anyone who, um,
Speaker 1: who disagrees with me on that is wrong. There's there's
Speaker 1: got to be something cute in there. And uh, and
Speaker 1: so you got you gotta go, you got your furry
Speaker 1: egg here. Um. But the furry egg is I think
Speaker 1: really something to ponder though, because in many ways it
Speaker 1: seems paradoxical and suitably alien. Right, because eggs we tend
Speaker 1: to just assume, you know, eggs are the domain of
Speaker 1: scale and feather, right, not the domain of fur. Sure,
Speaker 1: fur is typically the domain of mammals. But of course
Speaker 1: the mammalian world is not entirely devoid of egg layers,
Speaker 1: because of course we have the monotreams. Yeah, now monitreams
Speaker 1: are when we're talking about monotreams, we're talking about I
Speaker 1: think what five species around still today, One of course,
Speaker 1: is the platypus which were largely going to leave alone
Speaker 1: to its monstrous pools in this episode, because I'd like
Speaker 1: to come back and really dive into the platypus uh
Speaker 1: and focus on it because it is a true monster. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then it's wonderful. But then we have I think
Speaker 1: four different species of a kidnea to consider as well.
Speaker 1: So Monotreams are thought to have diverged from other mammals
Speaker 1: roughly a hundred and nine million years ago. There's still
Speaker 1: a lot we don't know about them and their connections
Speaker 1: to other mammals. But but among their most notable features
Speaker 1: is their egg laying. Oh and incidentally, uh, the name
Speaker 1: at kidna we get that from the Greek mythological figure
Speaker 1: a Kidna, who is sometimes described as the mother of monsters,
Speaker 1: and who is often depicted as having like a half
Speaker 1: snake half human body. Therefore, she embodies both mammalian and
Speaker 1: serpentine aspects. I'm just trying to remember. Why did the
Speaker 1: word a kidna make me think of vampires? Is the
Speaker 1: they're like a a kidna vampire in the Witcher Games
Speaker 1: or something? I don't know. I don't know, I've never
Speaker 1: played the Witcher Games, but I mean a kidnas a
Speaker 1: wonderful name for a monstrous enemy. So I think I'm
Speaker 1: brushing up against a sound alike here. But but a
Speaker 1: kidna in the mythological context is is cool enough on
Speaker 1: her own right? And uh And when we look to
Speaker 1: the organisms that we have dubbed a kidnas, they're really
Speaker 1: fascinating as well. Less frightening and monsters perhaps, but just
Speaker 1: weird and at times adorable. So I was reading a
Speaker 1: few different sources on this, one of which is as
Speaker 1: an excellent little article from the New York Times in
Speaker 1: two thousand nine titled Brainy, A kidnap proves looks aren't everything,
Speaker 1: And the author Natalie Angier, has this wonderful little paragraph
Speaker 1: describing their reproduction quote reproductively, Monotreams are like a VCR
Speaker 1: DVD unit, an embodiment of a technology. In transition, they
Speaker 1: lay leathery eggs, as reptiles do, but then feed the
Speaker 1: so called puggles that hatch with milk drizzled out of
Speaker 1: glands in the chest rather than expressed through nippled teats,
Speaker 1: and sometimes so enriched with iron that it looks pink. WHOA, man,
Speaker 1: I'm still reeling from that VCR DVD unit comparison. It
Speaker 1: makes me think this should have been the subject of
Speaker 1: a Fast and the Furious movie, Like they're trying to
Speaker 1: hijack a truck full of a kidna. They're they're they're
Speaker 1: they're weird looking creative. For first of all, that that
Speaker 1: that iron and rich milk. That's I'm assuming coming largely
Speaker 1: from their diet of ants and termites, So they're voracious
Speaker 1: ant and termite eaters. And yeah, they're just really look
Speaker 1: up a picture of one, because they're they're really neat.
Speaker 1: They have this this specialized snout clearly uh evolved to
Speaker 1: enable them to pursue their their main prey. And then
Speaker 1: they have these just pudgy, spiny bodies. They're they're absolutely
Speaker 1: weird and adorable looking. And if you look up images
Speaker 1: of of of a of an a kidna, puggle of
Speaker 1: a of a baby a kidnah, it is just even
Speaker 1: weirder and more cuddly. They're like little um little bean
Speaker 1: bags with with snouts. I believe the adults are spiny,
Speaker 1: aren't they are? The are the young also spiny? Know
Speaker 1: that well is well discuss the young are born or
Speaker 1: rather hatch without spines and then developed them later. But Yeah,
Speaker 1: the adults definitely have spines for their protection. Now to
Speaker 1: come back to the pink milk it, I was looking
Speaker 1: at a two thousand and eight Harvard University study that
Speaker 1: the claims that the achidna might have simply evolved away
Speaker 1: from suckling due the due to the demands of its
Speaker 1: specialized mouth parts and its specialized diet. So not necessarily
Speaker 1: a case here where the achidna is like, um, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, predates suckling, but rather might have evolved away
Speaker 1: from suckling as a means of carrying out its diet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe a mouth made for devouring ants is not ideal
Speaker 1: for this way of getting milk. Yeah, exactly, more for lapping.
Speaker 1: So so let's talk about the eggs a little bit. So,
Speaker 1: the eggs of an a kidna, I want to be clear,
Speaker 1: are not furry. Um. The achidna is of course covered
Speaker 1: with with spines, but also coarse hair, so this is
Speaker 1: still not a case of a furry egg. The egg
Speaker 1: is leathery and twenty two days after conception it is
Speaker 1: deposited directly into the female's pouch, and after ten days
Speaker 1: of gestation in the pouch, the puggle bust through uh,
Speaker 1: that leathery shell with a reptile like egg tooth, and
Speaker 1: then remains in the pouch for another forty five to
Speaker 1: fifty five days, continuing to develop in major ways, such
Speaker 1: as growing out those defensive spines and if you, I
Speaker 1: highly encourage everyone to look up video footage of this.
Speaker 1: I found a great a kidnapped hatching video that's easily
Speaker 1: found on YouTube from I want to say it's from
Speaker 1: the seventies or maybe the fifties. I can't can't recall.
Speaker 1: It's it's over footage, but you get to see one
Speaker 1: of these little puggles, and it's pointed out that the
Speaker 1: puggle is so uh, you know, immature, so translucent, so
Speaker 1: helpless that after it has stuffed itself with milk, you
Speaker 1: can see the milk inside of it through its translucent
Speaker 1: pink body. WHOA. That makes me think of the honey
Speaker 1: pot ants where you can Yeah, yeah, it does look
Speaker 1: a lot like that, you know. It's it's just so
Speaker 1: immature and helpless at that point. It's uh uh it's
Speaker 1: I was thinking it's kind of like a translucent gush
Speaker 1: or candy, you know, with a kid in the milk
Speaker 1: in the health wait didn't we also compare the honeypot
Speaker 1: ants to gushers. I guess we did. We just we
Speaker 1: just got gushers on the brain here. I don't even
Speaker 1: know if they still make gushers, but god, that is
Speaker 1: the most malevolent candy of all time. I don't know,
Speaker 1: now that I'm thinking about it. What do you think gushers? Um?
Speaker 1: You know they they have that kind of popping liquid filled.
Speaker 1: Maybe they're supposed to be like eggs. You know, children
Speaker 1: want to gobble up the eggs of some strange, purplely
Speaker 1: fruit scented creature, and that's what gushers are for. I
Speaker 1: don't want to know what happens if you microwave a gusher. No,
Speaker 1: I'm sure it's been done to certainly do not try
Speaker 1: it on our account though if even hasn't been done.
Speaker 1: Don't ever microwave anything because you heard us talking about
Speaker 1: something the blanket statement, All all liability erased. Yes, follow
Speaker 1: the instructions for heating anything in the microwave. Okay, So
Speaker 1: back to mono trains. So there were once hundreds of
Speaker 1: mono train species, and the largest that we know of
Speaker 1: was one that is known is zack Losis Haketti and
Speaker 1: it would have been about a meter long and a wait,
Speaker 1: about thirty k so about three point two ft long
Speaker 1: and weighing sixty six pounds. Um. I've seen some images here.
Speaker 1: I included one in our document Joe. You can see
Speaker 1: about how big this would have been. It would have
Speaker 1: been like, I don't know, what would you say, like
Speaker 1: a like a very large plump dog. Yeah, that sounds
Speaker 1: about right, A spiny bulldog. Again, not a furry egg,
Speaker 1: but in a way close to a furry egg. But
Speaker 1: but I will add that there is perhaps another possibility
Speaker 1: for furry egg hunting in nature. A certain moths are
Speaker 1: often described as being furry. Granted, we're dealing with something
Speaker 1: different than what you would encounter on your pet dog
Speaker 1: or your pet cat. But these moths, such as the
Speaker 1: gypsy moth, will actually cover their eggs with a coating
Speaker 1: that contains that quote unquote fur. So you know that
Speaker 1: might be one way to tackle the problem. I suppose
Speaker 1: the idea of an egg naturally being insulated with a
Speaker 1: layer of hair isn't completely crazy, but I don't think
Speaker 1: we see it, and and most examples we see entail
Speaker 1: a stronger alliance on the parent's body or efforts by
Speaker 1: the parent to secret the egg away in a warm place.
Speaker 1: All right, and for our final egg exploration or exploration. Uh.
Speaker 1: Here today, I thought we might consider the idea of
Speaker 1: the god in his egg. Okay, let's do it. So
Speaker 1: we we've mentioned this entity on the show before, uh
Speaker 1: and Joe, you might even remember it. Uh. I think
Speaker 1: I think we came up in one of our episodes.
Speaker 1: The Egyptian Book of the Dead speaks of this is,
Speaker 1: of course a translation quote that August God who is
Speaker 1: in his egg a terrifying entity said to rule over
Speaker 1: the realm of of exc within the Egyptian underworld. It's
Speaker 1: a It's described as a yellow realm that is hidden
Speaker 1: from the gods and subject to the powers of the
Speaker 1: eye that captures. And so there's an invocation for the
Speaker 1: traveler into the afterlife. Uh. I would say, hail to you, you,
Speaker 1: August God, who are in your egg. I have come
Speaker 1: to you to be in your sweets, so that I
Speaker 1: may go in and out of Xy, that its doors
Speaker 1: may be open to me, that I may breathe the
Speaker 1: air in it, and that I may have power through
Speaker 1: its offerings. Okay, so you've gotta prostrate yourself before the egg. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this weird. And something about this idea again, it comes
Speaker 1: back to this paradox of that is often inherent in
Speaker 1: the egg. You know, what is the egg, things that
Speaker 1: emerge out of the egg. But here especially the paradox
Speaker 1: of a thing that is post egg and pre egg
Speaker 1: at once, the thing that never emerged from its egg
Speaker 1: and yet is a complete being in some form, like
Speaker 1: it is a god, but it has not hatched, and
Speaker 1: it somehow has the powers of an entity that is
Speaker 1: um you know that that is that is you know,
Speaker 1: fully powerful. Yeah, I mean the egg is in many
Speaker 1: ways the archetype of potential. Yeah. So again the agus
Speaker 1: Gott in his egg terrifying, weird, almost impossible to behold.
Speaker 1: But it also does bring to mind. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you remember this character, but there's a character named
Speaker 1: Sheldon who was featured on in Jim Davis's U. S
Speaker 1: Acres cartoon, and this showed up on Garfield and Friends.
Speaker 1: Rachel and I were just talking about US Acres the
Speaker 1: other day. I don't remember why it came up, but
Speaker 1: we we both remember having this feeling where you'd be
Speaker 1: watching Garfield and then it would go to this other
Speaker 1: thing this farm thing, and I remember having this feeling
Speaker 1: like when is this going to start making sense? And
Speaker 1: I don't think it ever did. Yeah, you would, you
Speaker 1: would get Garfield, and you would then you would get
Speaker 1: us Acres, and then you would get a little more Garfield.
Speaker 1: It was what I like that I think they called
Speaker 1: like an ad a format um. But but us Acres
Speaker 1: had a whole host of characters, you know, your typical
Speaker 1: farm characters. But one of them, the one that really
Speaker 1: made it memorable, was that you had Sheldon, who was
Speaker 1: a chicken that was still in its egg. It was
Speaker 1: just an egg, like a walking egg, an egg with
Speaker 1: two chicken legs emerging from it. And there are other
Speaker 1: takes on this out there. There's a wonderful children's book
Speaker 1: by Many Gray titled egg Drop, and it features an
Speaker 1: egg that wants to fly, and I don't recall it
Speaker 1: actually has legs, but it certainly has like a will
Speaker 1: of its own, and it wants to do things, and
Speaker 1: it thinks it can do things that a a hatched chicken,
Speaker 1: a fully developed chicken, should be capable off. That's a
Speaker 1: funny symbol. I mean it. Uh. We all have the
Speaker 1: experience in childhood of wanting to do the things that
Speaker 1: adults do, not understanding why I can't do that yet,
Speaker 1: And in a lot of cases the reason is intellectual
Speaker 1: and emotional maturity. You don't have that like level of
Speaker 1: like brain responsibility yet to be an adult. But the
Speaker 1: egg is a different thing, right, because it doesn't have
Speaker 1: limbs and it can't move around on its own. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: And that's that's roughly kind of the idea that that
Speaker 1: many Gray explores in this this excellent book, which also,
Speaker 1: by the way, has some principles of aerodynamics involved in it.
Speaker 1: So I wouldn't say that it's the science book, but
Speaker 1: it has a little science sprinkled in it, and it
Speaker 1: has wonderful illustrations. Now the for for our purposes. Though,
Speaker 1: in the natural world, the prospect of an animal simply
Speaker 1: never leaving its egg is certainly fascinating. It's it's paradoxical
Speaker 1: to a magical degree. It's kind of like the aura
Speaker 1: bora serpent consuming its own tail. Right. But while we
Speaker 1: don't see examples in the in the natural world where
Speaker 1: an egg lasts forever like the egg is the final form,
Speaker 1: we do see examples where the egg phase lasts for
Speaker 1: a pretty long time. Oh yeah, I guess I've never
Speaker 1: asked this specific question before. What what is the longest
Speaker 1: egg incubation period in in nature? Yeah, Like, just to
Speaker 1: come back to Alien, right, there's that The open question
Speaker 1: in that movie is like how long have these eggs
Speaker 1: been here? You know, sort of applies like thousands of
Speaker 1: years or something. Yeah, long enough for for the for
Speaker 1: the engineer up there on the the seat thing to
Speaker 1: to rotten and become a mummy. But but yeah, when
Speaker 1: we look to the natural world, where there's some pretty
Speaker 1: startling um examples. Probably the most startling that I ran
Speaker 1: across is the deep sea octopus Granella dn boro pacifica.
Speaker 1: And it has been observed to brood its eggs for
Speaker 1: four point five years or fifty three months. Wow. And
Speaker 1: to put that in in a proper frame of reference,
Speaker 1: that's compared to the typical one to three month brooding
Speaker 1: time for shallower water octopus species. That's unbelievable. I mean,
Speaker 1: so an egg can't defend itself, So that would mean
Speaker 1: an egg has to either just survive on its own
Speaker 1: or be protected for for four and a half years
Speaker 1: before it can hatch and at least have like escape
Speaker 1: behaviors exactly. And and that's exactly. And what we see
Speaker 1: with the octopus is a mother caring for the eggs,
Speaker 1: looking after the eggs. And and of course one of
Speaker 1: the curious wrinkles here is that typically the mother does
Speaker 1: not eat during this period like she has she has
Speaker 1: deposited the eggs and now her only purpose in life
Speaker 1: is to protect them and to ultimately die protecting them.
Speaker 1: Like she's not gonna she's not going to eat, they're
Speaker 1: going to hatch, and then when they're gone, she's going
Speaker 1: to die. So with the deep sea octovists, this four
Speaker 1: point five year brooding period in which she looks after them,
Speaker 1: this is apparently the longest brooding period of any known animal.
Speaker 1: I was reading about this in a study by Robinson
Speaker 1: at All published in p. Los One in two thousand fourteen.
Speaker 1: And uh and they go into greater detail on this.
Speaker 1: You can find the whole study online. But the two
Speaker 1: key factors they say here are low temperature because of
Speaker 1: course it's the deep sea. And then this would means
Speaker 1: slower metabolism that we see other examples of this in
Speaker 1: other organisms in terms of just you know, slow metabolism
Speaker 1: and and low temperature but then also key here is
Speaker 1: the selective advantage of producing highly developed catch links. So
Speaker 1: it comes back to the idea that once they're they're
Speaker 1: they hatch, they're ready to go, they're well cooked, ready
Speaker 1: to move. The clutch size of the deep sea octopus
Speaker 1: is is quite small compared to other octopus species, So
Speaker 1: there's ultimately this focus on quality over quantity, instead of
Speaker 1: it being a situation where like, let's get some baby
Speaker 1: octopi out there, a lot of them are gonna get eaten,
Speaker 1: but some of them will slip by. Now, this is
Speaker 1: instead let's focus on a smaller bunch of of octopus
Speaker 1: young uh, that all have a very strong fighting chance.
Speaker 1: And while this might be a familiar tactic too, you
Speaker 1: know people thinking about mammals and birds and stuff, this
Speaker 1: is the less common choice for organisms that live in
Speaker 1: the ocean, right, I mean marine organisms are very often
Speaker 1: just sort of spamming with eggs. I mean like there
Speaker 1: there's tons of production of offspring with very little investment
Speaker 1: in each individual one. Yeah, it's usually um, you know, generally,
Speaker 1: when we're talking about about the cases that buck the trend,
Speaker 1: we're of course dealing with something like like a whale uh,
Speaker 1: you know, amalion species that return to the water, or
Speaker 1: we're dealing with, you know, really interesting examples from the
Speaker 1: shark world. But this is the octopus. So the reach
Speaker 1: of searchers stress though that this is a pretty abundant
Speaker 1: deep sea species. So it's not like we've necessarily found
Speaker 1: a true rarity in the natural order of things. It
Speaker 1: just seems like a rarity because we don't understand deep
Speaker 1: sea ecology well enough. Interesting, And and the other side
Speaker 1: of it that they point out is again, octopus mothers
Speaker 1: generally don't eat during their brooding, so it's it would
Speaker 1: seem to be the case that this mother does not
Speaker 1: eat for four point five years um and and this
Speaker 1: is not completely understood, but basically it seems like it's
Speaker 1: going to come back to the slower metabolism of deep
Speaker 1: sea creatures. Ye, so what you load up on a
Speaker 1: bunch of body fat or stored energy before this brooding
Speaker 1: period and then in the extreme coal old and dark
Speaker 1: I would imagine it's probably not moving a whole lot
Speaker 1: during this period. You just sort of like take your
Speaker 1: metabolism way way down so you can stay in it
Speaker 1: for the long haul without continuous reinvestments of chemical energy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely so. It's not quite the God in his egg,
Speaker 1: but it is interesting to see like an example of
Speaker 1: like what remains an egg the longest under natural conditions
Speaker 1: on our planet. I did not know about this octopus
Speaker 1: and this is absolutely majestic. Yeah. I mean, the occopus world,
Speaker 1: as we see time and time again on the show,
Speaker 1: is just full of wonders, and there's still so much
Speaker 1: we have to learn about them. Yeah, i'd imagine, especially
Speaker 1: with these really deep ones. Yeah. All right, well, we're
Speaker 1: gonna go ahead and uh seal the egg chamber shut
Speaker 1: for this episode. But like I said, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of eggs out there in the natural world, a
Speaker 1: lot of unique um egg forms, a lot of unique
Speaker 1: egg laying strategies. We would love to come back and
Speaker 1: explore more of these. You have, everyone out there's interested.
Speaker 1: If you're interested, let us know. If you have your
Speaker 1: own experiences with eggs of varying species, uh, feel free
Speaker 1: to write in and tell us about it. Or likewise,
Speaker 1: if it's just a really cool example of eggs in
Speaker 1: the natural world or something from science fiction that you
Speaker 1: think we should know about that we could really pick
Speaker 1: up and run with, then let us know about that
Speaker 1: as well. In the meantime, if you want to check
Speaker 1: out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you
Speaker 1: can find us wherever you get your podcast and wherever
Speaker 1: that happens to be. Just make sure you rate, review
Speaker 1: and subscribe. Huge thanks as always to our wonderful audio
Speaker 1: producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
Speaker 1: any other, to suggest topic for the future, to tell
Speaker 1: us your stories about eggs, or just to say hello,
Speaker 1: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind It's
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart
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