Ologies with Alie Ward - Oology (EGGS) with John Bates

Episode Date: August 14, 2018

The biggest eggs! The smallest eggs! The people arrested for stealing the most eggs! Oologist Dr. John Bates gave Alie a tour of the egg vault at the Field Museum of Chicago and it was a barrage of beautiful sights and shocking facts about bird butts. Get ready for speckly eggs, falcon tales, delicate treasures, pigeon mysteries, modern research with old artifacts, Easter bullshit, and whether or not you can hatch chickens from grocery store eggs. Also the carnival ride Alie will never ever ever go on.Field Museum of ChicagoThe Book of EggsMore episode sources & linksBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey. Hey, it's that. Hi. Hi, it's the lady from your mom's book club. Hi. The one who apologizes even when she brings cookies. Yeah, hi, it's Allie Ward. Back with another episode. Apologies. Oh, man, I never knew I needed this episode. Like, we've had an episode about ornithology, birds, but now we're going to get to the heart, the heart of the matter. And by heart, I mean butt. And by butt, I mean cloaca. So what is a cloaca? Well, as I've said before, it's kind of like the home button on an iPhone. Like if Steve Jobs had designed an orifice, just a multi-purpose little boop, it's good for sensual adult times for egg laying and poo. So today, we're going to be cracking wise about eggs. Oh, so many eggs.

So many glorious eggs. What a wonder. Okay, but first, this podcast really quick would not exist without patrons on patreon.com slash oligies. You can support for a dollar an episode, a dollar a month. Patrons get to hear what episodes are coming up next and submit questions for the oligists. And I say your name is right as my mouth possibly can. Also, oligiesmerch.com has backpacks, caps, bikinis, shirts, there's totes, gifts, pins, all science themed. But if money's tight because the world is falling apart and it's on fire, that's okay. Rating and subscribing and reviewing keeps oligies up in the charts, where other people can see it and say, what is this podcast that talks about slug dicks? And why does

this lady call herself my dad? I read all of your reviews. I'm upfront about it, alright? I'm kind of like a concerned parent reading the diary that you left open on the counter. And so to prove it, just like I do every week, I shout out one reviewer and this week I would like to thank Beyonce 23706, maybe that's Beyonce, perhaps it's a different Beyonce, who says, this podcast makes me want to make the world a better place. I love hearing all of these people who I would normally think of as existing on another plane and finding out that they're just people and I could be one of them too. I read that earlier today and I literally started crying. So thank you, Beyonce, for that. Okay, let's get the shell

back to this excellent episode, shall we? By the way, that is why I call myself your dad. Okay, so why is it called ology? Why are there so many god dang o's in this word? Okay, comes from one guess. Yes, the Greek for aion, meaning egg, and it's a branch of ornithology that deals with eggs. I want to think that the OO in ology is just because the mo's look like little eggies, but that's not true. Okay, so this interview, what a treat. Okay, I was in Chicago for a few days and I reached out to the Wonderland that is the Field Museum via the brain scoops, Emily Grassley, hey girl, and they hooked me up. So not only did they give me a quiet room to record the epidemiology episode with the errands of this podcast will kill you, but they were also like,

yo, we got an egg dude for you. So Kate Golubeski, I owe you like 10 puppies. Kate met me at the field and she walked me through the ornithology lab. Whoa, hi. So many jars. Up some steps. You know what I didn't realize also is that this museum is so big that our commute from one office to the other. That's a good 10 minute commute. I should have left a trail of breadcrumbs. To the office of an expert in bird babies, this kind-faced, bespectacled gentleman with thick salt and pepper hair and a desk piled with egg books and field notes. But it was a Friday afternoon at 4pm and I just hated to keep him from his weekend. So some of the questions and answers are super rapid fire. But then we had such a jolly time hanging out that afterwards he

offered to give me a tour of the egg bunker. And hell yes, I took him up on that. So throughout the interview, there are audio notes from that tour as we continued to just gab in the stacks. So this episode is just a feast of facts about speckly eggs and outlaw birders and falcon mysteries and vaults of delicate treasures and can you eat cookie dough and modern research done with old artifacts. There's some Easter bullshit and chicken hatching, even snake trivia. It's got it all. So buckle up. All right. Let's settle our feathers and ready ourselves for the ornithological treasures of oologist Dr. John Bates. Hi, I'm Allie Ward. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Thank you for talking about eggs with me.

Are you technically an oologist? No, I am not. What? Not an oologist? He literally edited the book of eggs. It's called The Book of Eggs and his name is on the cover. Like not an oologist, he studies bird eggs. Okay, I gotta breathe. Okay, more on this situation in a minute, but he is definitely an evolutionary biologist slash ornithologist and officially an associate curator of birds and head of the Life Sciences Division at the Field Museum in Chicago. What do you study about birds? Do you study particular like eggs of different species, feathers, beaks, like what's your bag? Well, I'm a curator and so we have one of the world's greatest collections of birds here in the museum and so one of the things I've been

interested in over the years is all aspects of avian biology, but the egg part actually came about because we have an egg collection and I feel like it's my responsibility to know something about eggs. So after the interview at his desk, John took me down this labyrinth into the bowels of the museum, just stuffed with millions of scientific artifacts, like for real, actually millions of artifacts. What you see on displays at museums is this laughably small representation of their actual shit. They have in files and drawers and boxes behind the scenes. So behind these scenes, we came upon a room labeled egg collection to which John had the keys. Wow. So this is our egg collection. Ah, what? This looks like a like a bank bunker. They really

look like you're making a bank vault. They do, yeah. Oh my god. So how many specimens in this room? So probably about 100,000 eggs. But now why do you say you're not an oeologist even though you study bird eggs? Yeah, that's because basically I don't know if you could find anybody who had described themselves as an oeologist anymore. It's a field that's, it's an extinctology at some level, which is too bad. That's actually one of the things that we're interested in. Some colleagues and I are interested in, we're actually working on a paper right now trying to encourage people to remember. And that is that there's these incredible collections of eggs around the world. And a lot of times they're pretty underutilized. People tend to forget they're there.

So oeology was really popular in the 1880s into the 1920s or so. And then it died out. And some of that was because people were a little bit concerned that there might be issues with respect to collecting eggs in terms of the population biology, affecting the population biology of birds and things. And so it was kind of fell out of favor with a lot of people. So, okay. So oeology can mean the study of eggs, but it can also refer to the hobby of collecting wild bird eggs, also called eggin. Now at some point, these amateur egg scholars stopped egging because it became illegal. People were like, well, you are stealing babies. Now Wikipedia says, and I quote, despite this, some of those who engage in egg collecting show considerable recidivism.

That is legal speak for doing bad shit again, like chasing the dragon egg. Wikipedia continues. One, Colin Watson was convicted six times before he fell to his death in 2006 while attempting to climb to a nest high up in a tree. Another individual has been convicted nine times and imprisoned twice. And a third has been convicted 51 times, imprisoned four times, and barred from entering Scotland during the breeding season. People are addicted to egg collecting. Also, one historical amateur ornithologist, Charles Bendier, who's stash of 8,000 formed the base of the Smithsonian's egg collection climbed a tree for some hobbyist egg thievery and was rightfully, if you ask me, shot at and scared away, but escaped climbing down the tree with a raptor egg in his

mouth. And the egg was so big that he had to and was willing to, rather, have his teeth broken to get it out of his mouth, like a cloake of face. So these were the oologists of yore. Perhaps that's why the term fell out of favor. But then the other thing that happened was you had the advent of things like cameras. And suddenly, you know, people, you could make an argument that you didn't need the specimen, per se, if you could take a picture of the eggs. So do you think that if you're not out actively collecting and studying eggs, then you're not an oologist? Well, I think so. I like to describe it actually as in an interesting way, I think, from the perspective of humans, which is that in some level, it's like pediatrics, right? So here's

this field where people study children. And this is a field where people studied eggs, but it's a specialization within pediatrics, right? They spent a specific thing. And I think that, in part, it was just because collecting eggs kind of literally fell out of favor. And so the terminology actually fell by the wayside at some point. I think it's time to resurrect it. That's actually, I mean, there's a lot of science that can be done with eggs. Yeah. So tell me about the collection you have and what do you like about eggs? Because I feel like you have to be into them in order to study them. I think aptitude is backed by passion, I'm guessing. So what is it about birds and bird eggs that you really, that you love or that you're

drawn to? So what I'd say, I think it's interesting to say, I mean, eggs themselves are just beautiful things in nature for one thing. But when you look at these collections, you start realizing that they're incredibly valuable pieces of our understanding of early natural history. So one of the things I always like to say to people is that, you know, you go back to our collections of bird specimens from the 1880s, a lot of times when they have very little information on them. But with the egg collections, it's very common for them to have these detailed nest cards, which describe exactly when the person found the nest, how many eggs were in it, what kind of tree it was in, very detailed locality information. And so these guys were actually

collecting really excellent natural history data, probably 10 to 20 to 30 years earlier than a lot of the specimen collectors were. So it's an incredible data. As a matter of fact, one of the things we're trying to do right now is work on various projects where we can use these data to look at what's going on today. So it's kind of like, thank you for the nest plundering back then. You monocled derelicts. But yeah, no, we don't do that now. That's not a pastime. Let's just play video games or scroll through pictures of other people's vacations on a tiny screen. But the dates in all of those amateur egg collections are very helpful. So for instance, we can look at nest laying dates for birds in the Midwest and ask the question,

if we have data from modern birds on when they were laying, and this is based on field observations from some of my colleagues, we can look at individual species and ask the question, are bird populations in the Chicago region laying their eggs at different times than they were historically? And it looks like there's the dates of laying have advanced actually, which is consistent with some of the potential issues that you'd expect due to climate change. So climate change is a biggie, as are the effects of pesticides and pollutants. So one huge detective story is often cited when the topic of vintage eggs comes up. You know, when I show this to people, and I talk about why we have these collections,

one of my favorite examples is, you know, paragon falcon eggs. So these were collected in the 1890s in North Dakota. Wow. And paragon falcons in the 1960s, along with ospreys and bald eagles had their populations plummeted. And paragon falcons actually went extinct in eastern North America. And what was going on is they weren't having any reproductive success. And it was because every time females laid eggs, they would start sitting on them to incubate them, they would crack. And scientists thought that this pesticide DDT was causing egg shell thinning. And one of the big pieces of evidence that led them to ban DDT in the U.S. was a study by these guys named Hickey and Anderson, where they went in and they measured

pre-DDTera egg shell thickness in these birds with post egg shell, post 1960, during the DDT era use. And they were able to show that they were demonstrably thinner in a bunch of the key areas. And so it was a great scientific design that was possible because they had access to these collections. And what I always like to point out is that this guy that collected these things, this guy Forsythe in 1917 had no idea that 40, 50 years later his eggs would be used for a study like that. So it's so cool to see current research being done on specimens that have been collected 100 years ago. Exactly. So just think, some of the citizen science that you do today might help future generations to study like which plants existed before the robots that we download

our consciousness into took over the earth and mined all the gold to make toilets and then darken the sky with clean coal emissions. Is that too dark? Sorry. When they would collect the eggs, would they blow the eggs out or would they just rot? What was happening? Okay, they'd hollow them out? Yeah, so yeah, right. So I guess they would drill a little hole in them and it was a real art. I mean, they were really good at it. And they would carefully inject a little bit of air. And once you do that, you can blow the contents out of a very small hole and you're left with the egg shell. Can you explain to me how an egg is formed? Because it is kind of odd to be like, hi, I'm a bird. I'm soft, I'm fluffy. And then boink, there's this hard thing that comes out of your

cloaca. What is it? Yeah, basically, the female has this developing ovum in her ova duct and it goes down and there's glands that produce the shell material and it gradually rotates and forms and you get the production of this perfectly layered, hard, and yet thin thing covering that developing embryo in an incredible way. And then there are all kinds of interesting things that happen after that with respect to making the eggs colorful or spotted or things like that. Yeah, so is it like layers on a jawbreaker, layer after layer of this calcium or is it like one layer of shell that happens at once? Yeah, no, it's my understanding of it is it's a layer thing. And they actually, as they're going down the ova duct, the shell gland is actually

putting it, laying on that material so that when it comes out, it's a perfectly formed egg. And then where is the air brushing station in the ova duct? Where are they putting on the speckles and like the robin egg blue colors? It's done in the, as it's passing along through the cloaca and in the ova duct and there are these melanin producing glands that are cells that will actually make the color, but that's something that actually some of the aspects of that are still debated by scientists. We don't know how some colors on certain types of eggs are made. And I understand like, okay, so we're surrounded by these like beautiful posters of eggs and I understand eggs that look like granite. Boom. Is it an egg or a rock? I don't know. I can't tell. I'm not going to eat it.

I get it. But like a bright blue robin's egg in a green tree, what's happening there? That seems so conspicuous. Yeah, so quick answer. We don't know. Okay. Right. But there are these eggs. If I showed you eggs of tin amuse, which are these neotropical birds that bunch of species, they look like little chickens that run around in either forest or an open country. And they lay these incredibly enameled eggs that can be anywhere from blue to brown to green. And they're just incredibly enameled. And we don't know why they do that. And one hypothesis, which is kind of crazy, would be just they wanted to look so weird that no predator would look at that and go, yeah, that's something we should eat. And they wanted to look like a weird toy or a piece of ceramic or

something like that. Yeah. Because I mean, they literally don't look like anything you would find in nature. So down in the OO vault, John showed me another egg that looked like a prop. Like, no way did a bird butt make this. Oh my God, are you kidding me? These are these common muro nests, eggs, this cliff nester. And you can see these are from Ireland. And they would have been laid by different females, such that the female could actually individually recognize each egg. And you can see these things like all these little squiggles come from the egg twisting as it's coming down the, the overduct. And it looks like you just took a sharpie or a marker to them. It looks like you, you let your like four year old nephew color them in, you know what I mean? But like,

or Jackson Pollock. Oh my God, they're gorgeous though. You can see this one sat for a while. And Oh, inside of the overduct? Yeah. Wow. Inside the overduct. And so it gets, it gets more of that speculate. Exactly. Wow, from those cells. That's so, I never knew that's how it happened. I mean, that's so crazy to think of it twisting and turning and making those marks. So just squiggling down the bird butt canal, getting a streaky paint job on the way. It's so delicately magically gross and beautiful. And what about egg shape? Why, why are they the shape that they are? So that's an interesting question that's been studied and published on fairly recently. And one of the hypotheses is that it's related to body shape at some point. Eggs a lot, I mean, eggs have a fairly defined

shape for the most part, but they're really interesting aspects of certain eggs. So for instance, eggs of some of the birds that breed on cliffs like common mirrors and things are these long pointed, have a thick base and then a long pointed tip. And one of the hypotheses has been that that's, they've evolved that way because they're on a cliff face. And if you roll that egg on a cliff face, it'll just roll in a tight little circle because of its shape. Now some other people have come along and said, no, that's not what's going on. But, but that's a plausible explanation for that egg shape. And do you eat eggs? I do eat eggs. Okay. So you're not like, you don't have a situation where you're like, Oh, I can't do it. Right? No. Um, is it bad for us to eat chicken eggs?

So I always like to say that that my pediatrician used to flip back and forth every year I went to him. Oh, really? My mom crazy, like he would come in and say, eggs are good for your son. Good. No, next year, eggs are bad for you. So side note, I was like, yeah, what's up with eggs having this like big reputation. So in 1968, the American Heart Association advised people not to have more than three egg yolks per week. It's like eggs are canceled, unfollow eggs on Twitter, do not invite them to breakfast. And then years later, some news came out that was like, eggs are fine. And then in the last few years, this new cholesterol kills campaign came out. And that's done by an organization called the truth about eggs. But that turns out to be

a vegan advocacy group. So I turned to official science papers for some sanity. And there was one about how eggs have gotten such a bad rap and seriously, they are fine. And I was like, okay, cool. Science paper, I trust you. And then I scroll down to the author bio of this science paper, and he worked for the egg industry. Good God, eggs. How is your PR more complicated than the JFK assassination? This is like of the mob specialized in brunch scrambles. I cannot keep track. So I guess if you're at risk for heart disease, consult your physician and read some papers and pay attention to who's writing the papers. I may be your weird uncle, but I am no doctor. Well, John is technically a doctor, but I'm not an MD. Not that you'll be making a bunch

of omelets now. I'm sorry. But if you were, you'd have to break some eggs. But what if it's a museum egg and you're an oologist? Have you ever broken an egg and been like, Oh, shit. Well, so the quick answer is no. But back in the cool egg dungeon, John withdraws a drawer slowly, and he tells me a tale of 1000 cringes. One of the greatest curators of birds at the Field Museum, a guy named Mel Trailer, apparently pulled this drawer out at one point too far and dropped it. And so even the greatest people can make mistakes. Now, the truth of the matter is it looks bad, but you're not really losing it. You're not losing the data, but still I can't even imagine what would it was like the day that that happened. What kind of words do you think came out of his mouth? He was an incredible

gentleman. So I bet he swore quite a bit. Oh my God, that is devastating. And so what has been the rarest or most beautiful specimen that you've seen? So I think some of the coolest eggs in the world are belong to a bird called the Gira cuckoo from South America. And they're these incredible eggs that they lay in big numbers. They're cooperative breeders. And I'm not exactly sure. Some of their relatives actually have multiple females on the same territory. And they'll actually throw eggs out on average. But they'll end up with a mixed nest of multiple eggs of different females. And these guys have so they'll have up to 10 or 12 eggs in the nest. And they start off with this white powder, but around them, but it's a blue egg. And so over time, the blue wears off and it

wears off in this kind of patchwork fashion that just gives a really beautiful color to them. So they have almost like an like an opposite patina almost exactly. Oh, wow. So later on the tour, I got a chance to see these bad boys. And they're this lovely minty aqua color, like a tourmaline blue with white patterns overlaid. And it was like a gaspathon. They're gorgeous. I mean, they look like ceramics. We just don't ever have an opportunity to see a lot of these. Right. You know, ever because when are you going to come across a cliff nest or, you know, something that's 30 feet off the ground hidden behind leaves. So that Gira cuckoo with the gorgeous eggs is sneaky and she leaves them in nests that are not hers. A bunch of cuckoo birds do this. And then their

babies hatch and then they bump out the other babies and the parents just don't even seem to notice that all of their babies are gone. And they now have one giant baby that does not look like them. Such gossip. And then this bamboozlery happens with other species, of course. These are annies, which are these black birds from the tropics, which are cuckoo relatives. And so they're, and these are these ones that have these nests that multiple females in the group lay in. Like daycare? Yeah. With the caveat being that apparently there's a older female that'll come along and throw most of the eggs out over time and then lay most of hers in there. But in that one, anyways. What a bitch. Are there any eggs that you know of that

are like so valuable monetarily wise? Like are there any that are like under glass and? Well, if I told you not. Yeah, that's true. You wouldn't have to kill me. We have a plaster cast downstairs of an elephant bird from Madagascar, which is a bird that was these one of these giant flightless things that was living in Madagascar up until the time the first humans got there. And the beaches in Madagascar, some places are littered with small pieces of elephant bird egg shell. And there are a few elephant bird eggs that have been found whole. And a lot of those are in museums. And my understanding is those are worth sometimes upwards of 30 to $50,000. That's a lot of money for an egg. But think how many omelets those things would have made. So many omelets,

which is probably why they're extinct. Exactly right. What's the biggest egg you have ever cracked? I once tried to eat an emu egg and it required a hacksaw. Was it any good? It was very rich. It was huge. It was overwhelming. But we whipped it up and made an omelet and it was like the most buttery kind of fatty tasting one. But it was like huge. It looked like in a giant avocado. Yeah. So I have to admit that most of my time has been spent with chicken eggs in terms of actually cooking and eating. So I'm trying to think if I've ever actually, I think I ever have actually eaten another bird's egg. Species? Not even a duck or a, yeah. Really? I once had deviled quail's eggs, which was weird. I just felt like a giant because they're so little.

But how do you take your eggs? Over easy. So does that mean runny yolk? Yeah. Why does that gross me out? But it doesn't gross other people out. Should I be grossed out? It's supposed to soak up what's left in the plate. If you've got potatoes in the plate, it makes the potatoes taste better. I don't know why. I don't know why. There's something that grosses me out about it. Okay. So another thing that grosses people out, the kalesa. Now these two coyly white threads that are attached to the yolk. What are they? What are they? Okay, they're just nothing much. Just ropes of protein. They're actually markers of a fresh egg since they kind of disappear as it ages. But why are they there? Like tiny slimy party streamers? Well, they suspend the yolk in the middle

of the egg, kind of like the slingshot ride at the county fair. But depending on how you personally feel about egg protein squiggles and carnival rides, one may have more screaming than the other. Also, side note, oh my god, I just went down a hole watching a compilation of like GoPro footage of couples on the slingshot ride. And it was horrifying and so, so amusing. And I only know from the gelatology episode that it's funny because we know that like everyone is safe in the end. But oh my god, watching adults screaming for their moms on carnival rides is something else. Wow. Oh my god. Also, never ever going on that. Ever. Okay, back to egg boogers. I need to get over it because other people seem to love it. But for some reason, the yolk, the yolk is what the

chick eats inside the egg, correct? Or is the yolk the chick? The yolk is what is going to eat. Okay. Yeah. So that's that would be the baby chick's food. So I should be okay with eating that, right? Right. Yeah, except that of course, that's the stuff that my pediatrician was always worried about every other year. The cholesterol and stuff. When you're cracking hard boiled eggs, do you have a better strategy because you understand the mechanics and the anatomy of eggs? No, that's one of those things that you just go for literally like, I think, and it's a satisfying thing because it's in the end, you have something like solid in your hand that you can eat. I think actually cracking raw eggs is more of an artistic technique that I've never fully developed.

I know the people that can do one in each hand. Yeah, those people, like, how do you learn that? Masters, they should be oologists to be honest. They need to take up the term as well. And now, how many eggs do you guys have at the Field Museum in collections? So the actual number is probably on the order of about 100,000. Oh my God. So the interesting thing about eggs is in collections like this is not the number of eggs individually, it's the number of sets of eggs. And so we have about 20,000 sets of eggs, which means that the eggs are laying by a given female at a given time and there's what's called

clutch size, which is how many eggs they've laid for that nest. And that's actually a truly interesting thing about avian biology because there's lots of variations. So we were talking about those elephant birds. Clutch size in elephant birds was two, which is, like you said, that's probably why there's no elephant birds left. If you think about it, ostriches are another big flightless bird and they have clutch sizes where a single, actually multiple females lay in the same nest, but they'll be upwards of 20 eggs in the nest because each female lays 10 to 11. And they're basically just hedging their bets with respect to producing their young because a lot of them are going to get picked off by predators over time.

And now they also have super thick shells because they have to drop like 12 feet from an ostrich's cloaca to the ground, right? Not quite 12 feet, but you know what I mean. No, I'll bet the ostrich actually lays them sitting down, yeah, for the most part, but they are really thick and like they're used by Bushmen of the Kalahari to store water in. Oh my gosh, what a cool purse. I mean, talking about a clutch, that would be quite an evening clutch. That's what they call little evening handbags. You're like, ta-da, it's an egg. I'd be willing to bet that's been done. Just FYI, yes, it has been done. Is there any flim flam about eggs that you'd like to debunk? Any myths about eggs that you're like, that is not

how it is. Myths about eggs. That bunnies don't lay them despite Easter. They don't. That's absolutely true. Do you love springtime because of the egg imagery? Or are you like, come on guys. No, because it gets really weird because of the bunny aspect of it. I think that confuses the biology. I think Easter egg hunting is great. I think Easter egg dying is great. The whole bunny aspect of it really gets messed up. I don't know how that happened. But how do you feel about platypie and mammals that lay duckbills? Oh, see, that's cool because they're just trying to be birds. Right. How did that even come about? That's a good question. From an evolutionary standpoint,

it would be potentially a retained characteristic from their ancestry with reptiles. And now, reptiles, were they the OG when it comes to egg laying? Because birds, reptiles, similar evolutionary pathway? Dinosaurs? I mean, birds are dinosaurs. We're looking at just, I think birds are just better dinosaurs. It's funny because for so long, it's like dinosaurs are extinct and they're like, no, they're not. There's a pigeon. Done. Boom. Also, where do pigeons have nests? They nest on little ledges and stuff. But that's a really great observation because as many pigeons as there are in the city of Chicago, I almost never see a nest. And the

other thing is, so that group of birds, so the columbidae, the family that they belong to, they lay clutches of two. That's their total number. And so you would think if you're laying two eggs on a ledge, any predator could come down and eat those things. And they're not particularly tough birds. So why are there so many pigeons? I don't know. I have a theory that maybe they just asexually bud and a feather falls off and then a whole another pigeon sprouts around it. And the only thing I would say that argues against that is I could show you pigeon eggs in our collection. Dang it. So we know they do it. Dang it. There was once, I lived in an apartment building and a pigeon got inside. And I did see a pigeon build a nest inside on the carpet. And I

told my landlords, I was like, you know, there's a pigeon like inside, like on the carpet. And they're like, leave it alone. And I was like, what about bird mites? I feel like we need to worry about that. Like, can we scoot it? So I did see one pigeon nest once, but it was like one foot away from my door inside on a carpet. And that it was just all kinds of wrong. And did you see any pigeon mites? No, but I think I moved before. Last thing I needed was bird cooties. Do you know what I mean? That's a whole not, you should, you can do a whole notherology on parasitology. Because birds have mites. Oh, we actually go into the field now and we do an active job of trying to collect them because they're co-evolving with the birds, essentially. And so

there's some really interesting questions you can ask with mites. Do you get a lot of gifts that have eggs on them? Do people say, I saw this and I thought of you? I do, because we did a book of eggs. And so people kind of know that I've worked, yeah. How many books about eggs do you own in reference? So I benefit by being in a place that has a, where our bird library is right down the hall. And that means I don't have to buy as many books on eggs. I can actually just go down and surreptitiously grab them off the shelf and check them out. And then the librarians have to come track me down to get them back. You're like, you're not too far, though. I mean, and who's going to make better use of a book about eggs than you? Well, that's my argument. Exactly. But

when somebody else wants it, they need to be able to find me. Did you ever have to do the thing in high school where they gave you an egg and they're like, don't break it. This is what parenthood is like. Did they ever make you do that? No, I never did that. Yeah, they would, I think they used to do that to scare, to scare teenagers away from like becoming parents too early as they'd be like, you have to take care of this egg for a week. And if you break it, you fail or whatever. So I think it used to be like a, which I feel like taking care of an unfertilized chicken egg is a lot easier than an infant. But what do I know? So, you know, now that you mentioned it, the one thing I remember like that is, was day camp and doing egg tosses. Oh, right. And like,

I was always one of those kids that didn't want to break the egg. I did not want to do it. Some kids didn't care. I did not want to break the egg. You had an early appreciation. Now, if you bought a fertilized chicken egg, like from Whole Foods, because you believed that for some reason fertilized chicken eggs were better, could you take it home, put it on a heating blanket and have some chicks in a couple weeks? Good question. I don't know. Yeah. And I wouldn't want to find out actually, to be honest with you. What are you going to do with those chickens? Yeah, exactly. If it worked and I wouldn't buy fertilized chicken eggs. Yeah. What is the difference of when you're eating an egg being fertilized or not? It could be taste or something. I mean,

I think, but again, I don't have any intention of finding out anytime soon. I looked this up and apparently you can hatch chickens from fertilized eggs from like Trader Joe's, provided they're pretty fresh and actually fertilized. Have you heard of belute? Hi, sorry, me again, just with another quick necessary aside. So, belute, what is it? Southeast Asian snack, often consumed with beer. It consists of a boiled duck egg. So, what's the big deal? Oh, also the duck egg was fertile and the baby duck has been developing for two to three weeks. It has like bones and a beak and stuff, just all boiled and eaten. But a reminder, lobster was once served as prison food because the idea of eating a sea cockroach was considered disgusting and

punishment. And I don't even know what's in nacho cheese, but I could eat it all day long. Now, if you've ever boiled a fertilized egg from the grocery store, you have eaten belute, just very, very underripe, if you will. So, belute, has John heard of it? Yes, I have. Oh, what do you think about it? I don't think I would. Yeah. Yeah, I think I'm good without eating belute. Yeah. When I first found out what belute was, I was like, is this a real thing or am I living in a nightmare right now? I think, you know, that you go around the world and people do a lot of interesting things. I know. I mean, I've eaten shrimp eyeballs, so whatever, you know. Was it good? I didn't. I did it for a dollar, so that part of it was good. Well, there you go. So, let's see,

what would somebody have to pay me to eat a belute? Yeah, how much? I see, I'm not coming up with an easy number there. $2,000. I would do it. Okay. I, oh, how many bites? You'd have to eat the whole thing, though. Yeah, no, 2,000 I'd eat the whole thing. All right, so that's your going rate for eating a belute? That wasn't that hard, was it? No, we came up with a number. Are you sure you want to waste $2,000 on being a belute? You have to really set it up. You've got to have it like it's your wedding day, send out invites, everyone's informal where we're going to get them to eat the belute.

It's the Twitter age. It is. I have some questions from listeners. Can I ask you? Yes, you can. Okay. Some of them are from my dad. Hi, dad. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors, why sponsors? You know what they do? They help us give money to different charities every week. So, if you want to know where Allergies gives our money, you can go to alleyword.com and look for the tab, Allergies Gives Back. There's like 150 different charities that we've given to already with more every single week. So, if you need a place to go donate a little bit of money, but you're not sure where to go, those are all picked

by Allergists who work in those fields and this ad break allows us to give a ton of money to them. So, thanks for listening and thanks sponsors. Okay. Your questions. But this first question though is from Neil Williams and it's a good one. One that has plagued me ever since songwriter Joe Raposo posed it on Sesame Street. Chicken or the egg? What came first? Yeah, good question. I mean, I guess the egg. Well, no, it seems it's funny because if you look at chicken as a common name for gallus gallus, which is a bird and dinosaurs, the ancestors of chickens laid eggs, then the egg came before the chicken. Yes. We figured it out. There we go.

God, everything in my life is so much easier now. You're going to get a lot of letters about that. Well, and you know what? I'll be like, why don't you console the noologist? I have one. He's right here. Jerry Davis wants to know, are there any eggs that are poisonous to eat? Wow, that's an interesting question. I don't know. The quick answer to that's no, not that I can think of. We were just talking about some of the today, some of the other, you know, like there's a bird that was found to be poisonous in New Guinea called a pitahui. But it's because it eats beetles and is able to sequester the poisons, but it's eggs I don't think would be poisonous. Oh, good to know. Way to go,

Buhuhui. Buhuiuhui? Pitahui. Pitahui. Spencer Toth wants to know, is a breakfast chicken egg really only one cell? Yes. Really? Yep. It's one cell? Yep. Where's the nucleus and the ribosomes and the organelles and stuff? So they're there. I mean, this is like the, yeah. I guess that makes sense, because of like any egg that a female of any species produces one cell. Right, it's one cell. Oh, that's weird. Oh, I've never thought about that. That's awesome. Sarah Nichelle wants to discuss century eggs.

How did they get started? Do you have you heard about these? So these are these ones that have been sitting around for a long time that for various likes of time. You know what, I mean, probably started because just somebody had an egg and forgot to eat it and then found it again and said, wow, I'm going to eat it. It's like, what I would tell them is that doesn't make it a good idea. Yeah. Someone, um, yeah, Ray Keisha asked the same thing. How can I deter my husband from eating 100 year eggs barf? So I got to look that up, but just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.

Now I was not familiar with Chinese century eggs, but they're traditionally made by coating duck or chicken eggs in salt alkaline clay and rice holes. And then they're left to ferment for a few weeks. Now the alkaline addition creates this black jelly like egg white and a creamy kind of dark green egg yolk. They have a lot of aliases. They've been called 100 year eggs, 1000 year eggs, also millennium eggs, all of them in exaggeration. They're really only fermenting a few weeks. Now one name which may or may not be an exaggeration, the Thai term translates to horse urine egg. Due to the smell, I cannot verify the veracity of that comparison. Ken, John? Well, again, you give me 2000 bucks and we're, now we're talking.

I love that you're going, Ray. You just switched from a bird researcher to just a daredevil bird egg eater. Brooke Basone wants to know, what's the smallest egg in the world? Is it a hummingbird? It'll be one of the hummingbirds and there are enough small hummingbirds that probably have similar sized eggs. The smallest hummingbird in the world is a bee hummingbird from Cuba. And the amazing thing there is they have clutch sizes of two and the egg of a bee hummingbird would take up a large amount of the, as we said, it's one cell and it's a large amount of the internal space in a female bee hummingbird. Is it just like the size of a tic-tac? Bigger than that? It actually looks very much like a tic-tac. That's exactly what you think.

I got a chance to see some on the vault tour and yep, they're just like a skosh larger than a tic-tac, but way smaller than a mento. They are 0% refreshing. Do not eat them on a date. And so here are the chicklets. That's a black chint hummingbird from Arizona. Oh my gosh, those are tiny. I've definitely eaten breath mints larger than that. Exactly. Oh my god, how cute and tiny. Which reminds me of an old joke from when I was a kid, which was, what did the hummingbird say when he laid an ostrich egg, when she laid an ostrich egg? What? Ouch. That actually segues perfectly into Katie Cobb's question. Here's a stupid question. Does laying an egg hurt? Like, it hurts for a human woman to give birth, but we don't do it a few

times a week. Yeah, I was actually looking as I prepped for this and our modern chickens, we eat five billion eggs a year in the U.S. alone and the average chicken produces like 360 or something. Yeah, like almost daily, right? Yeah. I mean, just like, it's incredible. And so does it hurt? I mean, I don't know. It's not the same as childbirth in humans. Right. We have, in childbirth, we have real messed up pelvises. Like our pelvises are not so great. See the Alangies episodes on primatology and gynecology for more on that. Did you ever see the movie Cool Hand Luke? Oh gosh, you know, yes. You did? What do you think? I like Cool Hand Luke. What about the egg eating part? Yeah, it never bothered me. Really? Nobody ever eats 50 eggs.

Hey, Baba Lugans, we got a bear here. My boy says he can eat 50 eggs, he can eat 50 eggs. Just thinking about that, sometimes when I make like a lot of, like a clutch, if you will, of hard boiled eggs, sometimes I think about that and I think, oh God. See, I think Rocky's the same way where he comes in after the run and just like, see, I would never do that. The funny thing is, if you asked me to eat an undercooked egg, a raw egg, I'd be like, absolutely no, get out of my face. But if you asked me to eat cookie dough, which contains them, I'm like, sign me up, I'm there. Right. What's the deal? It's completely illogical. Oh, mind over matter. Todd McLaren actually asks, what's your favorite egg art? Ukrainian Easter egg, Mediara, lace egg, Fraberge egg?

Oh, I think those Ukrainian eggs are like incredible. Really beautiful. Yeah, really amazing pieces of artwork. So these Ukrainian eggs or Psanka are ornately detailed using melted beeswax and they just keep dunking them and die over and over again. And yes, there is a museum to Posenka eggs in Eastern Europe in case you're into that. Now, onto a very special question from someone who is technically your grand pod, Larry Ward, aka my pops. He wants to know, how are snake eggs incubated? Does the mom or dad snake sit on them? Yeah, they do, actually. Yeah, they provide some. But it's funny because that's a good question, actually. We need a herpetologist in the sense that because they're ectotherms. So for this, I brought out the big

guns. And by guns, I mean snakes. And I reached out to Dr. David Steen of the herpetology episode, alongside Wild on Twitter. And he responded swiftly and with informational precision. He said, not all snakes lay eggs, but of those that do, the vast majority lay them and leave. They just incubate on their own. Now, pythons are a notable exception. They coil around the eggs, and they can use muscle contractions to generate heat. I like to think of pythons doing like a twitchy dance, like, let's hatch these dang babies. So thanks for the question, pops. Alicia Mansfield asks, what causes color variations in eggs of the same species? For example, chicken eggs coming in brown, white, or blue? Yeah, that's a, I mean, some of it's just individual variation. And so there's

some kind of genetic variation in the DNA. Well, I guess the DNA that's producing the compounds that are being deposited on the shells eventually. But there are these birds like these common mirrors where they've actually evolved the capacity. It's of their nesting on colonies on these cliffs. And everybody looks alike. And so the females have the ability to lay unique looking eggs that can be completely different looking from the bird right next to them. And that allows them to imprint on those eggs and then find them when they fly to and from the colony to eat. It's an incredibly cool thing. Wow. And they're still trying to do the research. So they're trying to figure out whether females lay the same kind of eggs from year to year. So whether that's

a genetically encoded pattern. And those are really interesting questions. That's great. I never even thought about that. Like, when you see speckled eggs that maybe look like granite, yeah, are those carbon copies of each other every time or the speckles in different places? I used to think that they probably was. There was probably a lot of variation that was genetically based. It may very well be that most of it's just randomly involved with how fast they're passing through the the cloaca at the time. And, you know, when they come out, it's literally just something different every time. And the birds can imprint on it and then find it the next time. Wow. That's so fascinating. Also fascinating, of course, how people treat

and eat their eggs all over the globe. I'm told that also you don't have to refrigerate eggs. In Europe, you just leave your eggs on the counter. Those Europeans. I know. They leave their butter on the counter. They have health care. They're crazy. Yeah. No, I mean, when I was working in Brazil the first time, people used to leave mayonnaise refrigerated out in the forest. Oh, hell no. And after a while, I started eating it. It was fine. Did you lose a lot of weight just because you were constantly sick?

No. Really? Now, speaking of salmonella, does that something that you worry about? Yes. Okay. Now, salmonella comes maybe from an infected bird. It comes right down the old poop chute and then you need to wash the eggs to avoid the salmonella, right? Yeah. And I think that that's one thing that's kind of amazing about industry is how well they're able to actually keep those things from being issues. Because I really, I mean, when there's a salmonella outbreak these days, it's kind of stunning how quickly we know about it and how

quickly in most cases they figure out exactly where they come from. I know. Isn't it crazy? P.S. Salmonella, I just found this out, is the same genus and bacteria that causes typhoid fever and of course just a whole bunch of food poisoning. Now, it can get on the eggs when it passes through the overduct of a chicken or in the egg as it's forming. Now, not all chickens have salmonella and some will show signs like lethargy if they do have it. Now, before you go hatching a crate of fertilized eggs, do know it turns out that backyard chickens, if they have salmonella, can pass it along, especially as the CDC warns, if there has been snuggling of the chicken and salmonella poisoning does land folks in the hospital

or it can be fatal. So don't go licking a bunch of chickens or eating raw eggs or poultry. Ironically, eating raw salmon seems to be fine but that's because the name salmonella was derived from one Dr. Edgar Elmer Salmon, a veterinary surgeon for whom it was named. Here, Dr. Salmon, we have bestowed you with a legacy for generations, a very confusing fish sounding disease of the chicken butt that scares people away from cookie dough. Also, if you're like a real cookie dough trollop like myself, just go ahead and make it with pasteurized eggs. Feel free to eat the whole bowl. Does anything in John's work cause him to eat entire salad bowls filled with raw cookies? What is the most annoying thing about eggs or your job?

Well, with eggs, I would say it's keeping track of them. So you have a clutch but you have four or five eggs in that clutch and so you've got to figure out, they number them all and so you just got to be careful with respect to getting things mixed up and things and then you don't have anything else to go on if things do get mixed up. Yeah, that's true. I mean, can you put a little number on them? They do put little numbers on them but let's say there are a bunch of little numbers and they were put on 120 years ago. It's possible that you could have a hard time deciphering what was done. Do you find that the notes are like very poetically descriptive, more so than they would be these days? Not really. What's beautiful about

them is the different handwriting. People had so much better handwriting. I did notice this when I was looking through and swooning over some field note calligraphy among the vintage egg stacks. I mean, that font too. He had good handwriting. I wonder, so do you think he was amateur or do you think he was pro? He was an amateur. Really? Yeah, all these guys were amateurs. Almost all the egg collecting was done by amateurs. It's really amazing. Wow, and they call themselves oologists. Yeah. And yet you've edited a book about eggs. Yep. I'm not calling myself an oologist. Oh my God. Oh, it's just pathologically humble. Just beautiful cursive and things in ways that nobody would do today. God, we got to get back into that, I feel like, you know, because those

were the original fonts. Maybe they'll make some computer programs that'll do it and I can actually effectively do some of that but it's not going to be me by handwriting. It'd be so funny if field biologists had to take like fountain pen courses, you know, like we got to keep it up, guys. There's no doubt that one of the things we should do is take printing courses and I'm exhibit A of somebody who is not good at that and I have immense amount of respect for my colleagues that actually write impeccable scientific field notes and labels and things. I'm looking at some handwriting you have over here. Not bad. I could tell you stories. Let us write this for you. Oh, that's one way to get out and do and work. That's like someone asks you

do the dishes so you break a dish. You never get asked to do the dishes again. Except in this case, it's like, I really wish I could do it. Well, I can't type so you can learn to print and I'll learn how to type. What do you love the most about eggs? I mean, just that they're such an important part of the biology of birds. I think that's the most interesting thing to me and the other thing is that actually with all the birds in this world and there are some 10,800 species, we probably don't know anything about the eggs of upwards of 30 to 40% of the species maybe. That's crazy. Which is kind of interesting. So there's a lot we don't know about eggs. There's so many mysteries. And what about your job? What's your favorite thing about your job?

Well, my favorite thing about my job is learning new things and getting to work with a group of organisms that I love and really kind of getting paid for to do my avocation. So you're a professional bird nerd. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the dream for a birder is to be like, that's like making the major leagues. Oh, yeah. I tell students that I started out wanting to be a, I was a pre-med and I took a cell biology course and I realized really somebody might pay me to actually study birds the rest of my life. So you're like veering off. It was an easy veer. Now, if you would have told yourself a young birder that you would get to do

this for a living, would you have just been so stoked? Yeah. I mean, I grew up, my dad was a birdwatcher and a very active birdwatcher and I actually started birding because my brother was four years older and I realized if I wanted to spend any time with the two of them, I better learn something about birds. So that's how I got interested in it. And I just, even back then, I fell in love with the idea of being able to study birds up close and in those, you know, in that kind of way. And now you get to study them every day. Yep. And things that come out of them. Yep. The inside and the outside. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And things that, you know, that last like that. Well, I think that your only job left is to

come to terms with the fact that you're an oologist. I think you need to accept that. See, I could put that on my door and on my cards and stuff. That's just not going to happen. There's imposter syndrome is everywhere. Everyone's like, I don't know if I know enough. And you're like, you wrote a book about eggs. What more do you want? You managed a collection of 100,000 eggs. But I think that the notion of, yeah, I mean, how many ologists can you actually be? So at what point in time will you enter, you know, because I want to be an ornithologist. I like the fact that I study birds, right? You can be more than one. I'm Italian. I'm also English. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. Good point. And you can be all kinds of things.

So, I mean, I live in LA. Everyone's a hyphenate. Yoga instructor, actor, life coach. So I hereby proclaim that you're an oologist. Fair enough. Yay. Thank you so much for doing this. This was so fun. My pleasure. I could ask you a million egg westerns all day. You'll have to come back and talk to an oologist. Which is you. So once again, Dr. John Bates of the wonderful Field Museum of Chicago. Now, if you like this podcast and the Field Museum, you should definitely check out, if you haven't already, the Brain Scoop, which is the Field Museum's web series hosted by the amazing Emily Grasley. She is a wonderful person and a great science communicator. So you might enjoy those.

Also, those videos are family friendly. So you can watch those with your kids all you want. Now, again, John was an editor alongside Barbara Becker of the Book of Eggs, a life-size guide to the eggs of 600 of the world's bird species, written by Mark E. Hauber and available through Chicago University Press. Now, warning, do you want to say, this book is gorgeous. And if you see it, you will want to purchase it. Treat yourself. Now, while you're at it, AllergiesMerch.com has you covered in terms of hats and backpacks and totes and sweatshirts, baby onesies. Thank you, Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltas for managing that. Also, I hear they may have some back-to-school type of things coming

up. They haven't even told me about it yet. So stay tuned. Also, thank you to the patrons who support the podcast for as little as 25 cents an episode for making this happen. Thanks, Hannah and Riverlipo, in Boston, and Aaron Talbert for keeping the Facebook group, the Allergies podcast group, fun and cool, full of curious, non-jerks. And thanks as always to Dinosaur Egg Baby, Steven Ramouris, for editing Allergies altogether every week. The theme song was written and performed by Nick Thorburn. And at the end of the episode, after the credits, you know I tell a secret. And this week, my secret is, these asides aren't that long, but it has taken me almost double the amount of time to record them because I keep starting one and then

messing up a word and having to start over. And I think it's because I'm recording this in my closet and it's a thousand degrees. But this has been one of probably the most tongue-tied episode I've ever had. I cannot figure it out. I'm just like, thank you for making it this far. I am about to collapse from heat on my computer. Oh my god. Bye-bye. Hey, baby, I hear the blues are calling, toss salads and scramble eggs. And maybe I seem a bit confused. Yeah, maybe. But I got you, Pigs.