You're listening to Weird and Dead, the paleontology podcast
that tells evolutions most embarrassing and bizarre
stories. I'm Megan Wetherell.
And I'm Amy Atwater, and we are two living scientists who are
weirdly excited about dead things.
Get prepared to gag and gag and gag as Amy gleefully describes
bird milk consistency and we Mull over the likelihood of
lactating dinosaurs. Some of which were pink, by the
way. Fully convinced.
And then she implicates me in a crime that we definitely did not
commit. Or maybe we did.
Or maybe you just got experience with crops for other reasons you
creep. Like always, our podcast is
disgusting. If you think mammal milk or
vomit or both are gross in any way, this just might not be the
episode for you. It sure shit was not the episode
for me. Are you ready?
Yeah, milk me mala every time you say I'm.
Like a wagon wheel. Okay, that's disgusting.
This is a good start. So obviously, guys, we're
talking about milk to some definition of milk.
Kind of, yeah. It kind of depends on how you
define milk, which is a great, actually.
Yeah, that could be even a great start.
Like, you know what is milk? It's not even across mammals,
like the same. And all mammals produce milk of
some type, but very weird and different.
Like the monotremes like platypus and echidna don't have
nipples. They just kind of secrete milk.
And I guess it's just like. From Milky patches.
Yeah. So like you are already, you got
you've, you've dabbled, you've you've.
Tip. To toe into the monetary milk.
But I hadn't thought ever because I don't think until it's
in front of me about other animals having milk besides
mammals because we think of it as so definitive.
And then last week, I was walking the Ridge with a friend
and we were talking about something about, like, female
stuff and like, oh, yeah, we don't get as much studies on
female anatomy. And my friend was like, oh,
yeah, I know, like crop milk. And I was like, what crop milk?
Kind of like when I said it to you earlier this week, I
immediately kind of had a vague idea of what it must entail, but
didn't had never heard of it or anything like that.
So today we're going to be talking about crop milk, which
is essentially bird lactation in a way.
Talk about how it's like your face is going to be so great.
We're going to talk about similarities and differences to
mammals. We're going to be talking about
the birds that do this. We're going to be talking about
some phylogenetic implications and some deep time implications.
And the paper I found that was literally titled what are the
what are the scroll up, scroll up.
Is it just yes, it's I love it. I love the title of a scientific
paper that ends in a question mark.
I'm just really like. Oh yeah.
This one is quite simple. It is just dinosaur lactation.
Which would also be a great band name, yeah.
It'd be great. OK, so let's dive on into this
crop. Yep.
Which again, I was familiar with the crop of birds, which is a
part of the digestive tract, right?
That is like at the base of the throat.
Essentially it's for food storage before it hits the tum.
Tum for digestion. It's just like an enlarged kind
of pocket in the esophagus. It's a pocket.
Yeah. It's a crop pocket.
I wanted to wear a crop top today, but it's, it's actively
snowing outside. So I am cold and wearing, I'm
wearing alpaca wool instead. So.
But underneath, I wish I was wearing a crop top for this crop
milk. And as I was reading about
crops, I was like, Oh yeah, do you know where I'm going to go?
With this, oh, I don't. Remember that time?
I don't but I'm really worried do.
You remember. You remember that time?
No, and I'm hoping that I just forgot it with the concussion
but. No, you didn't.
No, no, It was that time that we were in a place and driving to
go camping and we were driving my car.
You know where I'm going now. Yeah, I do.
I do. You're about to admit to a
crime. By the way, we didn't do a cry.
We didn't. I'm not going to say where we
work. Oh, right.
Is it a cry? It's a cry.
I mean, well, I'm not saying where we work.
OK, well I guess it's true. It's not a crime in some spots.
Are you kidding me? My stepmom is known in Eugene to
like be the person if someone hits a Turkey with their car she
they like text her and she goes and like harvests the.
Turkey she person of me wants to be compared to your stepmom
that's. A good call, man.
There's no beneficial aspect of that.
Well, I'll keep this, I'll keep this like speculative.
So we were maybe driving a maybe car, maybe it was a boat and we
maybe while you were driving had a pheasant that maybe just
jumped from the side of the road into us.
It was not our fault. We were there first and it maybe
died and I maybe said turn around.
And I was so confused like it's dead.
Baby put it in the back. Tapped that like we don't need
to go back for a double tap. I got it.
I didn't mean to, but I got it. I was like, and I was like, I'm
going to take that bird. I want that bird.
I mean, I maybe put it in the back of my car and we maybe took
it to that campground and we maybe dissected it and ate it
that night. Now let's let's say that that
happened. Let's just say that maybe we did
this. Now being a person who owns
sheep that we sometimes do butcher, I now understand why
maybe that would have resulted in US eating rubber as opposed
to it was not good flesh. It was it theoretically it was
really bad and it's rigor mortis.
We didn't allow it to sit. We were too eager.
You got to wait with the.
Tendons and making the the feet like making the feet and we, as
we were dissecting it, we opened its crop and it had a bunch of
fresh grass and little rocks in it and it was like green fresh
grass that had hey, it had a wonderful last meal it had.
It's just like the elk that was full of grapes on Logan's
parents. Hey, it made like maybe they
were fermented. Well, maybe that elk was fucking
drunk. That's why they got the nuisance
tag to take care of the Elks is because they would go for the
vineyards. So yeah.
Right. Yeah, and elk is grape.
Spilling. Delicious.
I mean, it's just there. So yeah, that is was my only
first hand experience with a bird crop.
Was that maybe that thing that maybe happened to us that one
time over a decade ago? A long fucking time ago?
Yeah. I don't know where we were.
Yeah. What's the statute of
limitations on that? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, Maybe it wasn't a pheasant.
Maybe it was our chicken we had with us at XI, Don't know.
Anyway, so the crop is where all this food kind of sins while it
waits to be digested and it processes down through it.
And crop milk is exactly what you think it is.
It is throat milk. It is instead of nipple milk.
It is making milk in your your throat pocket.
So they make it in their little throat pocket and then they puke
it into their baby's mouth. OK, so it does involve puke, but
fortunately in less of a direct like substance way than I was
worried about. I was worried that crop milk was
just like ornithologist really trying to like re pitch the idea
of puke being fed to baby birds that it was repackaged for APR
thing but. I see like the whole Got milk
campaign, right? Yeah.
This is like ornithologist being like no crop milk.
It's not creepy. Sardine soup, OK?
OK. So it is a secretion from the
lining of the crop that they then the generates there.
And we're talking a little bit about the the organic chemistry
of all that, which was the only time I've cared.
It's pretty rare. It's only documented currently
in like 3 different groups of birds.
Pigeons do it, flamingos do it, and emperor Penguins do it.
Now the question I saw a lot is, is it milk?
Yeah. What is the defining
characteristic of milk? What makes milk milk?
Yeah, that's a great question. Like I went to a talk once in
Graduate School from a woman who studied milk and primates, and
it became quite apparent that like a lot of things, it's not
very well studied. But in the most cases, human
milk is composed of fat, protein and some carbohydrates, which is
usually like a lactose of sugar, something like that.
Cow milk is quite similar. Camel milk is pretty similar,
but there are types of mammals that have almost none of the
carbohydrate in there. And some that have like marine
mammals have like shit tons. Like I think it was like, yeah,
like like hooded seals or something like that, have like
crazy amounts of fat in theirs. And they're young, are able to
gain like 40 lbs in a week off of this milk.
Like super, super saturated with fat.
I think it was like donkey milk has like no, has very little
carbohydrates in it. And so that's kind of the thing
with crop milk is it is it has both fat and protein like
mammals, but no carbohydrates. So it's totally keto approved.
All birds are into the keto diet, apparently.
Now milk is. You know what the.
Yeah, well, well, you'll see some pictures, so you can
determine if you think that texture would define milk
versus, I don't know, cheese, but OK, It's so for mammals,
including myself. I happily, I didn't happily
lactate. You lactated.
It happened. I did it.
Relaxated. It happened.
Oh God, I was there. I wish I was not there.
Oh my God. So it's like, I think there's a
common misconception that when you give birth, you can like
instantly like full stream ahead.
That is not the case. It usually takes a couple of
days for your milk to fully come in.
It's OK because your baby has a really small tum tum.
So even a few drops here and there can like be OK while your
milk comes in. I also use donor milk during
that time as well. And then Oh my God, like your
boobs get bigger throughout all of pregnancy, but holy shit,
holy shit, couple days after I gave birth I anyway and all of
that was controlled with prolactin and that's a hormone.
It's pretty common. It's exactly what is triggering
your ungulates to also produce milk.
Cows are one of the few other species that have more breast
tissue and have like a visible boobies kind of like us.
That's also not that common, but the difference is is OK.
So we just like got some like ingredient differences and then
but the hormone is the same, the basic makeup is essentially the
same and it's all by these glands, exocrine glands, right?
So that these are different ways that your glands are secreting
substances onto different surfaces through a bunch of
different ducts. So this isn't just milk.
We're talking sweat, spit, tears, prostate like all sorts
of. Really.
Fun stuff, just. The whole sweat tears, prostate.
You know how I secrete prostate? Yeah, it's just another
secretion. No big deal.
So crop milk is a Holocrin based like that's how it is formed.
So it's a different mechanism. While the the the stimulant is
the same with prolactin, the actual mechanism that the body
goes through to produce the milk is different.
Crop milk is Holocrine. So essentially what I learned
from this is like you have your little cells right that are
producing this this secretion. And there's a couple different
ways to let go of the secretion and release it into the gland in
the duct or what not. And with exocrine ones, it is
where they kind of burst and erupt.
There's some hand gestures, by the way, we're not filming
anymore because our internets are too bad.
But I do want you all to know that this is being acted out and
that is making it worse. It is a worse experience over
you're. Welcome, You are so welcome.
So yes, it is released by the rupture of the plasma membrane,
which destroys the cell and then results in the secretion of the
product being released into the tube.
So I I equate this to zip popping.
So it's like great and it is helpful.
Better. Yeah, you're right.
That's a good analogy that is super fun for everyone.
So just imagine your throat pocket is live with zits.
I hate that. Yeah, so mammals do apocrine a
system instead, where instead of the cells, the secretory cells
actually bursting and rupturing, they create.
I mean, this paper literally was like blebs.
I was like blebs. So it kind of buds off of the
cell and creates that like its own little BLOB that then is
created. So that's how like that's how
human, that's how mammal milk works, is it?
It's more like a lava lamp in my opinion.
Lava lamp levels up and like like it loses the top of it.
And so one article was interesting because they were
pointing out that the holocron style actually does destroy
those cells by rupturing and it is a greater impact on the
parental energy investment. It's like more of a negative for
them. Yeah, it sounds bad.
More just yeah, yeah. It's not.
It's it's you're popping a bunch of zits in your throat to make
milk for your baby. Throat sits for your your
babies. Sounds bad.
Yep. Yeah, but it works.
It works. It gets the job done.
You're not a pigeon, you don't know, you weren't there.
If you want to scroll to your first picture, it's I don't
think it's that bad. This is just the picture of the
crop in a pigeon, which is relevant because the first
animal we are going to talk about that does crop milk is the
pigeon. Pigeon milk is quite well known.
They keep scrolling. Really illustrated the butt hole
on this like that is deeply. Emphasized.
I do. You're going to notice that
right away. I was like my girl, she's got
me. She's rectum.
What's? The armpit glands that that's
got going on here. Pectoral percatarialis major
muscle cut across. Oh, those are just it's.
Peck muscles. Yeah, this is, this is an image
of like a cross sectioned like drawing of a chicken that has
been tilted very explicitly and specifically to show you the
cloaca. Like the cloaca is really, they
didn't have to. They contorted this animal's
body in order to make, it's kind of like those superhero posters,
you know, where the woman has to contort her body to show her
tits and her ass at the same time.
Like we're getting full crop and cloak.
Yeah, those are both very prominent.
So is the trachea trachea. I remember that about that.
Maybe that time we maybe dissected that wild maybe bird.
It was that trachea. I was like, holy shit, this is
fucking wild. This is wild.
So pigeon slash doves, right? Pigeons are doves.
They're the same fucking thing. They have babies called squabs,
which is cute. Is it like, what is the game
that has like a pigeon that's people plays at Animal Crossing
and they're like, would you like pigeon milk?
I don't know. I'm not, I don't do.
Games I don't know. I don't do that.
But I don't do that game. That's for fucking.
Sure. Yeah, they often pigeon milk.
And I was like, yeah, so. So baby pigeons are cute, and
they're hatched at an undeveloped state.
So they're not they're. Not able.
They're not cute. Well, they're little blade
creatures with no feathers and giant eyes that are.
Yeah, agree to disagree. Disagree.
I think you're going to disagree a lot here.
So it's all good. It's all good.
So they are pretty underdeveloped, I guess when
they are first born. So they're not able to eat the
solid food or like garbage that pigeons eat.
So and they but they grow like crazy in the first couple of
days of their lives. And that's because they're
eating crop milk like their parents, which both males and
female pigeons can produce crop milk.
Most of our scenarios today, both the males and females can
do it, which is another difference this from mammals.
Males do not typically lactate. They technically have all of the
equipment, all of the stuff. It has happened in human males.
It's documented. It's not very common.
I think I really freaked out my friends husband after she gave
birth and he was like well I can't help with that.
And I was like, well. Technically.
Technically, it can happen too if like, I think the documented
cases are really, really old. But like a mom who dies and the
baby, like the baby crying and stuff like helps stimulate a
male to lactate, which is very fascinating.
But in a lot of these birds, both, both of them can do it.
And then the Penguins that we talked about, it's only the
males that do it. So with pigeons, it's only,
they're only doing this for like the first couple of days or the
first week or so. It's not very long.
It's. Yeah.
One paper described it as white slime, I mean Cassius material.
I found a picture of it online. I know what Cassius means and I
don't like that at all actually. I don't know what that means.
What does that? Mean.
I'm pretty sure that just means cheesy.
Yeah, most of the places describe its consistency as
cottage cheese. Yeah.
Yep, Yep, Yep. So if you want to go ahead.
I'm so. Sorry, this is the worst part.
OK, OK. Page.
No. OK.
And I'm gonna just keep going. I am not OK.
OK. It looks like what someone has
done here. This is horrible.
I I hate you for this. I'm going to have nightmares
about this. It looks like someone took like
2 patties of ground beef and then puked on them.
And that's the. And then they put it next to a
ruler. That's what we're looking at.
That is. Oh, my God, that.
Oh OK, I thought they said it was white.
An image that is absolutely, I know that paper arguably was
from like the 1930s, so I don't know they knew what.
Colors were it wasn't actually black and white.
Those are just the movie. It's tying, I'm tying.
OK, well, I'm going to walk you through it.
So the first image. So these are all like dissected
bits of pigeon at the first one. A, there's four images here.
A is a crop during the non breeding season.
So we just got an empty throat, pal.
It just looks gross, like a little sack of flesh.
And then the second B through D is all cropped during the
lactation period. So I mean, yeah, it's filled
with a kind of chunky, yellowy, grainy.
If you've seen The Last of Us, it looks like the mushroom
coming out of people's heads. I know you haven't.
That was for the audience I know.
I know, I know, I love. I'm doing an episode on
mushrooms just to gross you out. That's what we're going to do
next. I deserve that, I deserve that.
I'm a little friendlier with them now because I found ways to
enjoy them. So this paper, Megan, I was
like, wow, there's a lot of studies on pigeon crop milk.
That's weird. Yeah, it's because there are a
lot of countries in the world where pigeons are important
commercial poultry, and they eat a shit ton of pigeons.
And they needed to understand like how to synthetic make a
synthetic pigeon milk so that they can make their squabs grow
as fast and as big as possible. And that's.
Why there has been so much research on it and as you can
see at the bottom part of this page is an actual bag of pigeon
crop milk like synthetic mix that you could buy if you found
like an abandoned baby pigeon squab and you felt so you were
so, you know, you just you were a loving person.
You could buy this and you could feed them synthetic pigeon crop.
And if you wanted to, you know, make it realistic, you could
like, chew it up and spit. It I don't, no, I don't.
I will say that being able to finally Scroll down and see that
this is milk replacer for, for chicken or not for chickens, for
pigeons, I keep selling them chickens.
That looks like a chicken is that's so much better than what
I thought it was, which is I thought you were saying that
people needed to be able to synthesize it to eat it, that
they were eating pigeon cheese and that pigeon cheese was like
an important component of many cultures.
And I didn't want to make that sound when we're talking about
other cultures, but fuck me, I'm glad that's not the case.
Oh that's hilarious because the eating of pigeons was actually
news to me and that was my own ignorance as well and I went
through my own feelings about which is stupid.
I eat chicken. All the time.
We used to eat pigeons all the time in America.
We ate the passenger pigeon to extinction.
Oh well, it must taste great then.
Exactly my fault that they taste delicious.
Look at the thing they're raised on.
Look how nutritious and delicious that is.
Well, probably nutritious. I don't know about anything
else. I don't want to.
I'm going to keep. Scrolling.
Well. Oh my God, that's not.
The worst? Well, I the next well don't
scroll yet. We'll, we'll get we're moving on
to the next bird. Want more weird and dead content
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you buy books. So, flamingos, I could see the
hedge. OK, so flamingos are also
another bird that produce crop milk that feed their young fur
up to about the first six months of their lives.
Both males and females do it. Yeah, go ahead.
You can go ahead and scroll. You can go see what it looks
like in in Flamingos. Oh.
Is that the traditional feeding mechanism where one yeah pukes
it onto another one's head or? Apparently, Just go ahead and
click on the link. Let's watch the.
YouTube wait. It's only like it's only like 40
seconds and. For context, what I'm currently
looking at is 2 Penguins and a Penguin chick or not Penguins?
Oh no. They're flipping ghosts.
I am currently looking at 2
pink. That's the word I was looking
for pink birds. Flamingos feeding their chick.
Except the way that they're feeding their chick is that the
top Flamingo appears to have puked red crop milk, which Amy
has titled Flamingo crop milk strawberry flavored and that
milk is dripping down across the eye.
But it makes it look like the top Flamingo has brained the
bottom Flamingo to feed their young.
So OK, now I can go click on this.
Yeah, it's like a waterfall effect.
Like they're, they're like instead of each feeding it
individually, they're kind of like cascade feeding for this
cute little baby. Yeah.
And so you can just go ahead and watch this great little video.
It's still loading, you don't. Really need the sound and.
What? OK there really is like this
just feels like a weird way to involve your Co parent.
Why do you have to puke it on the other one's head?
I mean, it's beautiful. As a family of three myself, I
find this inspiring. Kelly next child we have, I'm
going to lactate onto your head and the baby's going to try and
slurp it off of you and. It will cascade off of your
titty. Onto the back of the bird.
It's not even making it into the little bird's mouth.
This looks like 2 animals who don't know how to do this.
These are new parents. It's hard, man.
It's hard, OK. I mean the title.
Is backwards for like a week. Two adult flamingos trying to
feed the same chick like. Yeah, that's true.
Yeah, OK. But a lot of people, because
it's bright red, a lot of people thought it was blood or that
they were being like attacked or feeding their child blood.
And it's not because flamingos eat this like, you know, krill
and tiny thing rich diet that gives them the carotenoids that
make them this pink color. It means that their crop milk is
fucking blood red. It it it's just the beauty of
nature. All things wise, yes, endless
forms, most beautiful are being evolved.
So they're right. So they eat a lot of algae and
brine shrimp. That is why they have their
beautiful pink colors. And so when they are doing their
crop milk production, apparently they also lose some of their
plumage color during this time as they're like kind of giving
it up to the baby, I guess. Like red dye #40 deliberately
feeding it to your child. Yeah.
Imagine if you're fake tan or like ran as you were lactating
or something. It's.
The same shit. Yeah.
I was Googling it and I was like, oh, I've used that.
Yeah, no, exactly. Like if you.
No, it really is like if I I mean, I was part raised on
kool-aid. This is relatable.
Like I remember as a child making my own kool-aid.
I was like 3 cups of sugar and no water and I was like, so.
But as they go on that, it gets less red apparently, because I
don't know why, but apparently it does.
But yeah, it's all about what they're eating and whatnot.
Yeah, with this carotenoids that create that.
So what I found really interesting about this is a
paper I read that was all about how important it is for the a
lot of flamingos are endangered. And it is important.
I think all species actually maybe, maybe not, that the
people need to be able to know how to hand rear nestlings for
when they're abandoned or orphaned in the wild.
And so this entire paper was literally about a recipe for how
to make Flamingo crop milk. And I thought it was awesome.
So I'm going to read you the formula for you right now.
I don't know why I found this so amusing, but I was just like,
this is like a recipe, but it's for.
We're just really getting crazy as people with our ability to
replicate milk, like we are making new milks from nuts.
We are just yeah, the milk industry is bizarre.
Yeah, I mean, and I know the next time I get a coffee, I'm
gonna be like, no, not oat milk. No, not almond milk, not soy
milk, not regular milk. I would like Flamingo, milk
pigeon. The next Starbucks idea Penguin.
Yeah, Flamingo milk. Yeah, everyone wants a pink.
Drink. Just make it pink and taste like
shrimp and there you go. So it's super easy to make your
own. I was thinking for a bonus for
Patreon we could like make this but it would require ordering
some ingredients that I don't want to get.
So it's some bacteria. OK.
Mineral water fish pellets grill human baby organic rice flour 1
medium sized hard boiled hens egg yolk.
Go back to the baby flower. What the fuck did you just say?
Yeah, 20 grams of human baby organic rice flour.
I like to pause. Just for you, okay.
So the human baby organic rice flour.
Yeah, that was me. That's because I'm a sicko.
Yeah. So essentially rice flour, but
they spell it all out. An egg yolk, some large bird
tablets, more bacteria, some calcium carbonate.
And then you mix the rice flour, hard boiled hens, yag oak, egg
yolk, calcium carbonate, vitamin tablet and the water were mixed
into a liquid form and put into a bowl.
Then the fish fillets and the krill and the other bacteria
were mixed in a separate bowl, filtered and strained to get rid
of any course particles, and then mixed with everything
together and and store it in a fridge for up to 12 hours before
being warmed to 39°C and fed to the chicks.
That's fucking hot. That's hot for Celsius.
So yeah, that's how you can make your own Flamingo milk.
Now if we do. Apparently it works.
Except this is a challenge. Do we have to taste it or are we
just making? This I can't.
Yeah, you. Know me, I hate seafood.
It would be. Horrified, but I as soon as they
got to like the the fish fillets, I was like, I'm out,
I'm fucking out. I'm not here for this.
Yeah, so that's how you can. So it's not blood.
They used to think it was actually blood and then they
like actually read about it. But what's funny is this article
was from like the last five to 10 years or so and they're like,
but it's hard because there's no work being done on the chemical
composition of Flamingo milk. And I was like, well I just read
a paper from. Are they just making it up?
Yeah, well, they were going based on a formula from the
SeaWorld California and Fort Worth Zoo, Texas.
I don't know if you want to take any advice from SeaWorld
California, though. You know, like choices choices.
But I found another paper from 2001 that literally went into
the chemical composition of Flamingo milk.
So I was like, how was my literature review better than
yours? I don't.
I just feels like there must have been at SeaWorld a Flamingo
milk sommelier, right, who's just trying to get the flavor
profile down correctly 'cause they don't know what's in it.
Like, yeah, that's, that's what that recipe sounds like.
Is it? Sounds like me trying to
replicate Yum sauce. Not necessarily chemically but
taste wise. And that's gross.
That's a weird job. Yeah, oh it's really hard with
Yum sauce. Fucking holding on to that
recipe. Those bastards.
Bastards can never get it to not be gross and chunky just like
that pigeon milk. OK, thank you.
Hey, Yeah, actually, OK, that's a benefit of the Flamingo milk
is it does not appear to be chunky.
Yes, it's red and it looks like blood but doesn't look like
cheese so. Yeah, and our last one is the
emperor Penguin and I couldn't find any images of it anywhere
because this something happens at like the dead of winter in
Antarctica, so no one is out there.
Bummer. I.
Bet it is the chunkiest. I mean, come on.
I mean, I don't know, I wasn't there.
OK, so they're super weird because it's only the males that
can produce the crop milk. So can you guess why?
OK, why could only the males produce crop milk?
I mean it's still produced in the crop.
I don't know, maybe the the females are off getting fish and
so they are already busy. Exactly, exactly.
So I have never really, I mean I kind of cared 'cause they're
cool. They like to like, mate with,
like or attract each other with rocks.
I can relate to that. But so female fasts I think like
they do it Penguin style. I really hope that your
microphone just captured that sound, but it will not capture
your recreation of it. And I just, I don't even know
what to. Yeah, OK.
Well, yeah. So Penguins have sex.
She ends up fasting for like 40-50 days while she's gearing
up to lay that egg. She loses 1/4 of her body
weight. So once she gets that kid out,
man so relatable. She's like I'm out and she goes
to the open ocean to feed while daddy Penguin incubates the egg
for about 65 days. I've read this really old
article, it's probably out of date but like while like she's
waiting to pop out the egg. I guess they're like learning
each other's calls and their vocal stuff because when they
come back, there's like too many dudes.
The article was like, well, there's no way they can tell the
difference. They all look exactly the same.
And I'm like, you're not a Penguin.
I don't know how you would know that.
That seems so arbitrary. I don't.
So the daddy Penguin incubates the eggs for 65 days ish and
over this period the males will lose about 40% of their body
weight. They start out at about like 34
to 40 kilograms. I did not put that into pounds,
but it's a big fucking bird. Big ass bird.
And then the chicks hatch around mid-july, which is usually when
the females come back and they, like sing to each other to find
them in the herd. But if the egg patches before
mom gets home, the male, even though he has been like totally
fasting this whole time, sitting on this egg, will still be able
to feed the baby crop milk. So that's why only the male is
able to do it. Because when mom gets back, she
pukes fish everywhere and everyone eats it together like a
beautiful family of three. I love it.
It's so cute so but then the article also was like but before
you like. This is my take before you get
carried away with how amazing the male is.
If the male loses enough weight before the female returns, he
just straight up abandons. Yeah, yeah.
I got to go eat some fish, motherfuckers.
So they also eat or they also produce this crop milk.
So it seems like a lot of times that the crop milk is a, an
adaptation to allow birds to survive and have babies in
environments where there's food scarcity sometimes or there's
irregularity with like what food is available, lack of energy
density to support the growth. So it, it, it does seem to be
from these fairly extreme conditions that are able to do
it. And it's not just about the
nutrients. It's also building up the immune
system for the Bibis. That was actually going to be
one of my questions. Is that with mammals for the
first, Well, at least with sheep, it's the 1st 24 hours.
They're not really producing milk.
They're producing colostrum, which is milk is, but it's also
just antibodies. Yeah, it's, Yep, it's gross.
It's like yellow. It is yellow, yeah.
I mean mine was straight yellow. Yeah, yellow and significantly
thicker. Yeah.
So do birds that make crop milk make colostrum?
Or is this kind of like a colostrum milk mix?
I think the whole thing is essentially A colostrum milk
mix. So it sounds like the flamingos
are the only ones who do it for any long amounts of time.
The pigeons and the Penguins are both pretty short.
Like kind of just like stopgap measures to get to when mom
comes home or when the baby is developed enough to be able to
eat on its own. So I think it's pretty much jam
packed with all of that. But yes.
And mammals it's different. But also I don't know if anyone
has studied like the stages of what?
Who would want? If it changes.
Who wants to milk a pigeon? People who?
People who want to eat a shit ton of pigeons, apparently.
How do you even get the pigeon to?
How do you milk a pigeon? Do you take a tongue depressor
You. Just like work the throat like
a. She's giving her own neck a hand
job right now. That's what she's doing.
Oh my God, it is. Yeah.
But it does have definitely an immune system thing as well.
And so also another cool point was they tend to have not like a
small number of offspring in all of these cases too.
And my first question, when my friend told me about this and
mentioned the different birds, I was like well wait, are any of
those closely related? And no, they're not right?
Like this is not one lineage who has figured this out.
These are very distantly related birds.
Like they are nowhere near each other on the bird family tree.
We've got 3 fucking weirdos up in here and yet they've all
evolved this independently. It seems to be a convergent kind
of trait, which immediately then I was like, well, shit, that
means dinosaurs had crop milk. Dinosaurs.
Birds are dinosaurs. If it evolved multiple times in
modern birds that have only been around for I don't like, I don't
know how many millions, not as long as dinosaurs were around.
There's got to be dinosaurs that have produced crop milk.
Yeah. And you know, to my not
surprise, someone had published a paper on that.
So I was a little annoyed because I wanted to be like milk
dinosaurs. Yeah, but dinosaur lactation
question mark is this paper single author pub, which always
makes me wary. It publishes in 2013
hypothesizing that yes, some dinosaurs, specifically
herbivorous site nesting dinosaurs, would have had the
ability to produce crop milk. So these would have been like
ornithopod dinosaurs, probably hydrosaurus, like duck bill
dinosaurs, excuse me. And because hydrosaur colonies
regularly nested at the same sites, and a lot of these sites
we do know, like I've been out to the Egg Mountain site in
Montana where my asaura was doing the nesting thing.
A lot of it doesn't have a ton of evidence of like a ton of
vegetation or trees. They seem to be fairly exposed.
They may have been exposed to pretty harsh environmental
conditions. And again, like the birds,
dinosaurs specifically, he really thinks it's like the
hadrosaurs. But I really don't think that
I've come to my own conclusions and I'm a fucking expert.
So step aside. I think that like, I don't think
it would have necessarily just been herbivorous dinosaurs
because it's certainly not just herbivorous birds.
So I don't entirely, you know, this.
The reason behind that is like, well, they're the ones that we
have proof of the parental care, which I'm like, well, that's not
even necessarily true. Like we have Oviraptor and
stuff, which I think is more thought to be omnivorous.
And I could see that Oviraptor. So part of it with flamingos,
why they're doing this is their little, their little bills are
too soft to do all of the filter feeding that they need to do
with their little and. That's why the parents need to
do this. And I'm like, OK, well, that
could be applying to other dinosaurs as well, like
Oviraptor. You think that beak was like,
ready to go as soon as that baby was born?
Maybe. But maybe they were using crop
milk. Especially in like the freaking
Gobi Desert, You know, it's like fucking dunes of sand and wind
storms all the time. And I'm also, you know, I think
that there could be a case to be made for things like the Arctic
and Antarctic dinosaurs may have been more likely to have
dinosaur milk because they lived in this extreme, at least with
light fluctuation and again, probably food availability in
their environment. So especially if there's like
any type of migration involved. So I mean, I'm, I'm not out now.
The question was could do, did dinosaurs have crops?
And I haven't been able to figure out if we have any solid
evidence of this or not. Certainly not in this paper.
It seemed to just be kind of like a just like amusing kind of
thing it says. And so, yeah, 2013 that we
didn't have fossil evidence of it, but his idea was that since
there are crops and birds of all types of diets.
It doesn't. Seem to be limited by diet.
So that means that at least in his opinion, different all
different types of dinosaurs may have had crops and may have been
able to do this. So you can go ahead and Scroll
down to this horrifying image of someone's recreation of a
ornithician hatchling. You know they've made the milk
look wet and white. So significantly less gross than
any of the other images you've showed me.
Almost cute. To me it really.
Not, not quite. Serious, this one fucking
grosses me. I really don't.
It's just a dinosaur with milk dripping out its mouth.
Sure, milk, totally. That's what I thought.
A. Cute fowl fowl creature, yeah.
Fowl. The whole thing is on fucking
birds. Yeah.
I was just like, who? This is gross.
I was like, this is inappropriate.
Yeah, but it's a cute little hatchling dripping milk.
Definitely milk from its mouth. It's definitely milk.
Mm, hmm. It's definitely milk.
So, yeah, there's a there is some, it's been published.
Sean, I didn't make this up. Yeah.
And yeah, there's some thoughts that dinosaurs were able to do
this. And then my last little point
was as I was looking up, OK, well, are there any dinosaurs
that were in Flamingo like niche and not dinosaurs, but there is
a pterosaur pterodosterone that was a filter feeding pterosaur
that is interpreted to live in the exact same niche as
flamingos. It's from South America from the
early Cretaceous. It had about 1000 bristle like
modified teeth and its lower jaws that have been hypothesized
to be used to strain crustacean crustaceans, plankton, algae and
other small creatures from the water.
And of course our favorite Bob Baker was like, well then they
were fucking pink. Then these pterosaurs were pink.
Pink, pink. And so I do like that, yeah.
Yes, and so when I was like, OK, we talked about this before, but
I'm just like, OK, everyone who's like, no, we don't know
what color extinct animals are. I'm like some wear pink because
they ate shit that made them pink.
So we may not know anything else but they were pink.
But of course the Reddit take on this I was so annoyed but also
laughing. The post I found was called
Satan's Flamingo and I was like what?
Like again these fucking they have to make it like red like
the devil and I'm like no it was pink.
Stop trying to make it cool. Stop trying to make it like
violence. Stop trying.
To make it scary. It's right.
It's pink. Get over it.
It was fucking pink.
You can't. So you can go ahead and Scroll
down and see that these images of pale art as well as the
skull, which made me then immediately go, well, if they
were doing the same feeding strategy, maybe they also had
crop milk. Maybe pterosaurs also had crop
milk. Look at that beautiful throat.
They could have fit a lot of. Crop in there.
That is quite an insane bill, so I would imagine that it would
take some time to develop and wonder if we have any idea what
their babies look like. Do we have?
I don't think so, because all pterosaur material is so scant
they do not fossilize well. Those little hollow bone
motherfuckers. So yeah, I don't.
I don't think there's that much known.
This is a reconstructed skull too.
I don't even. Think the fossil looks that.
Nice, so it's very limited, but pterosaurs may have been pink,
they may have lactated, dinosaurs may have lactated, and
birds definitely did. It evolved many, many times.
I can't wait to see what the future holds.
The future of bird milk. It just makes me feel even more
like I don't even really like dinosaurs.
And now I'm like, oh, we both lactate.
That's. What I need that's.
What I need Thank you for listening.
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Spencer and the hosts. And this has been hosted and
researched by us, Amy Atwater and Megan Weatherall.
Thank you for listening. Hold on a second, I gotta milk
it. Every time you do something like
this, I'm like, Oh, well, there's the clip we'll put at
the end of the episode, but you've done like 10 of them now,
so I don't know what we're gonna do.