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It seems fairly straightforward to me..when it is expensive to procreate due to restricted resources, procreation becomes picky. Birds are mostly monogamous bec
by jelliclesfarm 5y ago
It seems fairly straightforward to me..when it is expensive to procreate due to restricted resources, procreation becomes picky. Birds are mostly monogamous because flying is very energy intensive and the male parent doesn’t want to waste resource on fledglings that isn’t his..obviously, exceptions exist. It is very costly to raise the young. Parental investment is high.
It is different for birds that don’t fly. Water fowl especially have a different reproductive system. Because they don’t fly. This is true for all flightless birds. Even for birds like geese that only fly for seasonal migration. They get their food from the water. Ground dwellers have plenty of food and don’t have spend as much energy foraging for food as a bird that flies. Very few of them mate for life.
Further: Galus Galus has different design than geese and ducks. Castrated roosters are called ‘capons’(French)…produces a nice soft fat capon for Sunday lunch. It’s genitalia is less developed than say..geese.
As a chef, I knew how to sex identify geese/duck. water fowl genitalia is different than fowl. Most farmers know this as sex determination is key to raising animals for profit. With the exception of Pilgrim/Emden/White Italian and some Chinese geese where the autosexing is straightforward with feather colouring and down colour, most have to be identified while they are still goslings.
Goslings can be gender identified as early as the first week and also when they are adults. Male adult penis is invaginated and like a corkscrew. Female organs has genital eminence. The breeding ratio is 1:3 or max 1:5. So it’s important to separate them as early as possible.
Mammals are different..example: feline penii is barbed and most copulation results in kittens. A female cat can have a single litter with multiple tomcats. Male cats will kill kittens ..probably those that aren’t their own..because a lactating mother cat won’t go into heat.
With insects like bees and mantii, the male often meets his end after sex. It comes down to energy needs and availability of resources.
P.S: [..] Birds, she thought at the time, didn’t have penises. In her two years studying them at Cornell University, a world leader in avian research, she’d never once heard her colleagues mention a bird penis.[..] Huh! Really? Cornell university scientists don’t know what a farm child picks up during one farming season? The article is full of red flags for clickbait lies.
- oneoff786 5y agoI don’t understand how sexing birds isn’t a solved ML problem
- Decker87 5y ago
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- HeyLaughingBoy 5y agoMaybe it is and humans are just cheaper?
- msrenee 5y agoI mean, you kind of have to squeeze them a little to see the genitalia. I guess you could have a human hold the bird over the camera or something to sex it, but it's just as easy to teach that human to tell the difference themselves. I don't really see how machine learning would improve this process
- saalweachter 5y agoIt was also technologically easier to develop sex-link chickens, where the male chicks are one color and the female another.
- oneoff786 5y agoI confess my mind jumped to sexing chicken eggs that are probably in a controlled environment anyway. Not a live bird.
- msrenee 5y agoI'm not sure if you can sex them in the egg. Maybe there's some kind of cue.
- chrischen 5y agoIf birds can identify their own genders from exterior physical characteristics then that means there are subtle physical clues that can be trained via ML.
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- toshk 5y agoOh wait swans...
- yunohn 5y ago> It seems fairly straightforward to me.. Your comment has a lot of interesting info, but could’ve easily done without this opening. I don’t see the need to reductively frame your experience against this entire scientific exploration.
- robertlagrant 5y agoIf you don't see the need, does that matter? What's the need for saying this?
- mschuster91 5y ago> P.S: [..] Birds, she thought at the time, didn’t have penises. In her two years studying them at Cornell University, a world leader in avian research, she’d never once heard her colleagues mention a bird penis.[..] Huh! Really? Cornell university scientists don’t know what a farm child picks up during one farming season? The article is full of red flags for clickbait lies. Uh, here in Germany we took until February 2022 to have the first anatomically correct drawing of a human clitoris in a schoolbook [1]. I'm pretty sure the US hasn't reached even that state, given that university textbooks aren't accurate either [2]. And when we can't even manage to have anatomically correct drawings in university textbooks for our own species, how on earth can we assume that the situation is different in veterinary science?! Farm kids obviously know the difference because they have first-hand experience. But most farm kids don't go and become veterinary scientists or scientists at all! [1] https://kurier.at/leben/gesellschaft/keine-scham-klitoris-erstmals-korrekt-in-schulbuechern-abgebildet/401906452 https://kurier.at/leben/gesellschaft/keine-scham-klitoris-er... [2]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/nejny8/fear-of-the-clit-a-brief-history-of-medical-books-erasing-womens-genitalia https://www.vice.com/en/article/nejny8/fear-of-the-clit-a-br...
- InCityDreams 5y ago>Uh, here in Germany we took until February 2022 to have the first anatomically correct drawing of a human clitoris in a schoolbook [1]. Oh, for shame. Back in the '70s a whole bunch of pictures of human (oh, and animal) clitorinks were hidden in a box under my friends dads bed.
- b112 5y agoBut most farm kids don't go and become veterinary scientists or scientists at all! What the?! Where is your data on this? Do you think the offspring of farmers are stupid? This seems incredibly biased.
- zardo 5y agoScientists are what 1% of the population? I doubt even children of scientists mostly become scientists.
- msrenee 5y agoI'm a little confused about your statement that waterfowl don't fly. As far a why a Cornell scientist didn't know about bird penises, it's because the vast majority of bird species don't have them. If she didn't do much work with Anserids, it wouldn't be surprising at all that she hadn't encountered them.
- jelliclesfarm 5y agoFor food. They don’t have to fly around for calories. They forage at ground level(ground dwellers) as mentioned in the reply. I mentioned this because most birds have hollow bones and high metabolism. Most birds burn most of the food calories they collect because flying is very energy intensive. This was about fowl and water fowl penii. That a male duck has a penis is rather well know farmers and chefs and scientists who study about their subjects. The bird mentioned is a ground dwelling bird (possibly flightless) and every scientist is required to ask WHY. The answer to The Why of fowl and waterfowl having penii is simply because they are ground foragers or aquatic. I used to cook at an offal restaurant and I have pulled enough pluck to know that human beings will eat anything when they are starving if poor.. or when rich enough to seek culinary adventures.
- msrenee 5y agoWaterfowl do fly from water source to water source. Also, they migrate. Also, their bones are hollow. I still don't see how penises have anything to do with being flightless. You've decided that since tinamous are fairly terrestrial birds that it must be a terrestrial bird thing, so you've found a way to convince yourself that waterfowl don't fly enough to be considered flying birds and then you shoehorned some theory in there about that causing them to have penises. Chickens, even the Red Junglefowl that the domestic chicken presumably descended from, are much more terrestrial than ducks and geese. You've worked in restaurants. What kind of penis does a chicken have? You know what else is aquatic and doesn't fly? Penguins! What kind of penis does a penguin have? Loons? They're basically wonky ducks. Pheasants, turkeys, kakapos? They've all got penises, right?
- 5y ago
- tnorthcutt 5y agoWater fowl […] don’t fly. This is incorrect.
- jgraham 5y ago> Birds are mostly monogamous This is quite misleading without further context. My understanding is that a majority of birds are observed to be "socially monogamous"; that is they form a pair lasting a single breeding season, and the pair works together to raise that season's brood. It's only a minority of species in which the same pairs reform across multiple seasons. I don't know how well understood this is; at least for sea birds, which are general among those to form long-term relationships, I've heard a theory that it might be related to the fact that fishing is an aquired skill that should improve with age; finding enough fish to feed both parents and chicks is difficult, and therefore there's a bigger risk if you change partners. The difficulty of finding food, and long time after birth before the offspring become self-sufficient, means these birds can typically only raise one or at most two young per year, so again the cost of failure is high. Even though in general the rate of social monogamy among bird species is high, this doesn't mean that birds are always parenting their own offspring. In some species (kittiwakes, terns) parenting others' chicks is really rare, but in other species there can be high rates of sexual infidelity e.g. some studies suggest that ~20% of chicks in flycatchers and ~30% in cardinals are unrelated to one (or, less commonly, both) parents. The latter may seem surprising, but of course brood parasitism (e.g. cuckoos) is well known, and there's a same-species variant of that in some species where a female will intentionally lay some eggs in the nest of another pair.
- jelliclesfarm 5y agoYes, indeed. Thanks for explaining. In birds, pair bonding is seasonal. It’s a reproductive strategy to ensure survival of the fledglings. Of course, there are exceptions here too..there are brood parasites too. Long migrations, short nesting periods .. long incubation time and of course anything that requires courting displays (like the peacock..swans etc) make monogamy a necessary evolutionary strategy. Some migratory birds return every year to the same spot they roost every year and such memorized cooperative efforts make them staunchly monogamous. I have had the good fortune to witness a pair of nesting ospreys for the past five something years. Nature is wicked smart.
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