hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Weird Biology! today, I’m going to give you a fresh look at a really weird bird you may have heard of before. so get ready to learn some badass new facts about this scrappy little football!
so say hello to:
*HEAVY METAL SCREAMING*
all right, so there isn’t much badass about a hairy, nocturnal, flightless, island-dwelling bird a little bigger than a chicken. or so they’d like you to think.
Kiwis live in New Zealand, which is fitting because they’re the Hobbits of birds. (bear with me a minute and put down the torches, please)
I swear I’m going somewhere with this
like Hobbits, Kiwis live in burrows. also like Hobbits, Kiwis are short, stocky creatures; they grow to be about eighteen inches tall and 7 pounds. (this is just slightly larger than the average chicken and probably larger than you thought they were) like Hobbits, Kiwis are voracious omnivores and eat basically anything they can fit in that ridiculous beak. and finally as I’m sure you’ve noticed, Kiwis are prodigiously hairy. like Hobbits.
and finally, the Kiwi would absolutely carry a cursed item to the ends of the earth and throw down with a Ring Wraith. (but they’d do it out of spite)
spite is the only emotion the Kiwi can feel
see, Kiwis are aggressive, territorial, and extremely tenacious. they defend their territories and burrows against anything and everything, including humans and probably also marauding armies of orcs. which, since Kiwis have squat muscular legs and extremely sharp claws, is no joke.
it’s a lot less funny when you realize that they’re at least as fast as you are.
adding to their sheer tenacious badassery is the fact that Kiwis are even still around. I don’t know if you guys are super familiar with what usually happens to flightless island-dwelling birds when humans and non-native predators show up, but it’s not good. (HINT: starts with an E and rhymes with “distinction”)
hundreds of years ago, humans first arrived on New Zealand. and they brought dogs and rats with them. these predators have been taking huge tolls on the Kiwi population for a very long time, but Kiwis are fighty tenacious bastards and against all odds they’re still here. for comparison: the Kakapo (New Zealand’s other largish flightless bird) has faced the same problem with introduced predators and is now damn near extinct.
Kiwi resilience is in large part thanks to New Zealand’s conservation programs, but also Kiwis are just tough little bastards who don’t know when to quit.
but I’ve saved the most thrashtacularly metal feat of the Kiwi for last. Kiwis form bonded pairs for life (awww), and lay one to two eggs together per year. which, okay, does not sound like a lot. however, there is an important fact that needs to be brought into consideration:
yes, that’s a REAL FUCKING XRAY. HOOOOOLY SHIT.
the egg is fucking huge. like, up to 25% of the mom’s body weight huge. that’s completely fucking ridiculous and it’s upsetting to even think about.
but that big egg makes a big, well-developed chick who comes out of the shell ready to stab you in the shin and sprint into the bushes. they’re literally born ready to throw down and are basically mini-adults. but still adorable.
continuing the family tradition!
unfortunately despite their badass ways, Kiwis are currently still under threat from introduced predators. the good news is that Kiwis are loved, celebrated, and protected by New Zealanders. (who are justly and rightly invested in their national bird, shin-kicking quirks and all)
there are many conservation programs in place for the embattled Kiwi, and its weirdness is a light that won’t be going out anytime soon.
shine on, you little weirdos, shine on.
thanks for reading! you can find the rest of the Weird Biology series here.
if you enjoy my work, maybe buy me a coffee so I can caffeinate myself into the 5th dimension.
This was a joy to read
😘
The ranger at the national park that my parents visited last year described the Kiwi as “We had the ecological need for bagders, but no mammals, so the birds evolutionarily squished themselves into a badger-shaped hole out of sheer rage.”
While I was performing at DEAFinitions 2018 conference at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, I was really lucky and blessed to have met an incredible Deaf Buddhist monk (for real!!!) named Rev. Oshin Jennings. He gave two workshops and talked about his efforts to make Buddhism accessible and open to Deaf and Disabled people, and also to reach out and support all POC communities. He also spoke of his struggle as a Deaf man studying monkhood and being rejected / shunned by other Buddhists for being Deaf.
His creed focus is Zen Buddhism, but his sangha and website are welcoming of all, regardless of creed, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, gender identity (etc).
He is working to develop an ASL Buddhist dictionary and has shown us various ways of meditation using ASL signs and mudras. This is especially helpful for Deaf people, including myself, who cannot verbalize vows or hear chantings during meditation.
Rev. Oshin Jennings is a wonderful person and I hope more people know about him and reach out to him to bring accessibility to their sanghas.
He also organizes sangha meet-ups at Gallaudet University so if you live in DC, you could go and check it out and meet him ^_^
Pretty sure that generation has been dead for awhile but ok, pretend one thing has something to do with another
The end of Jim Crow laws was in the 1950′s. The first black student to attend a formerly all white school was Ruby Bridges in 1960.
Here she is being walked to school under the protection of Federal Marshals because angry white people were ready to harm or kill her.
Here she is in 2010, eight years ago.
The generation that enforced segregation is not dead, fucko. They were our fuckin grandparents, and it was not that goddamn long ago.
Google is free.
Say it again for the ‘Ancient History’ chimps in the mezzanine.
My parents were in high school when desegregation got to Florida. I remember my grandmother showing me in my dad’s yearbooks the first year his school had black students, they had two Homecoming Queens and Kings and two Prom Queens and King, one black and one white. That was my father’s junior or senior year, so it would have been 66-67 or 67-68.
My mother went to a private Catholic school. I’m not sure it desegregated until the 70s.
I agree with the first response. People who experienced Jim Crow laws are not the ones responsible for them. If your grandfather went to school in the 50’s and had to suffer under segregation, it wasn’t because he had the political capital to change it, but chose not to. Now what students did as they became adults is an entirely different manner.
One of my favorite chicken facts to share is that hens can “become” roosters, at least in regards to their appearance and some behaviors. Long story short, hens have one working ovary; if it ceases to function, they can become more male-like (read more about it here). But since it’s a fairly rare phenomenon, I didn’t think it would happen to one of my own chickens!
Meet Coco. Several months ago, she had fallen under the weather only to reemerge with redder, shinier feathers and a longer, arched tail. Coincidentally, the males of her breed are mostly red, and that tail sure is getting rooster-y. My best guess is that Coco has been undergoing a spontaneous sex reversal.
Coco seems to enjoy this transformation, especially since she doesn’t have to worry about laying eggs anymore. You go, new Coco!
one of my hens became one after my rooster died. grew spurs, started crowing, the whole nine yards. so environmental pressures can effect it, yeah? unless it was a huge coincidence.
I’ve heard that many hens do this when there are no roosters yea like they kind of take up the mantle of roosterness
Listen sometimes doctors are actually wrong so if a spoonie, especially one who’s been sick for years, tells you something along the lines of their doctor is being an idiot and they’re wrong, the correct thing to do is not tell them “well they’re the one with the degree”. The correct thing to do is not tell them “well they know best, they’re just doing their job”. The correct thing to do is just listen.
Because, and this may shock those of you that don’t deal with this constantly or haven’t yet run into a doctor like this: sometimes they’re genuinely not doing their best. Sometimes, they’re being lazy. Sometimes, they’re treating every patient the same regardless of the fact that the patient they’re treating hasn’t responded to the treatment they’re insisting on. Sometimes, they’re just not willing to admit that the treatment they are using isn’t working and that something else needs to be done, even when they something else is available. Especially if the someone talking to you about their doctor is disabled.
And no, this is not where you pipe in with, “well that’s just a shitty doctor then!”, either. Because a lot of doctors do those things, especially when the person they’re treating is disabled or has a lesser known illness or unknown symptoms. Especially if the person they’re treating is disabled with a lesser known illness. Ableism often plays into how professionals treat their patients, and doctors are absolutely not an exception.
I self diagnosed 5 of my 7 major health labels. After years of doctors fucking me around I went in like “I think I have this refer me” and what do you know I have 4 of the things and just got referred to a more specialized specialist to confirm the 5th.
My twin sister almost died of melanoma (skin cancer) when we were 8 years old because every single doctor she went to said it was just a mole even when my mom insisted they were wrong and that it was growing and changing and they even said she just fell off her bike and cut it open and that was why (they went to like…10 doctors) and when someone was finally smart enough to think “hey maybe this mother who was a nurse for 10 years is correct” and biopsied it, boom it was Stage IV. If they hadn’t spent almost a year trying to get someone to just frickin diagnose it and listened, it wouldn’t have been so severe
I’ve suffered from medical emotional and physical abuse so this really hits deep. No, doctors DON’T always have their patients best interests in mind. Sometimes they just want to be done with treating you. Sometimes they get outside money to push ineffective or possibly very dangerous drugs onto you. Not even mentioning the medical field’s bias towards women’s pain that kills people all the time. Honestly? ask any person who’s had more than just casual check ups with a doctor and they’ll probably have some sort of horror story to share, I know so many people personally with them it’s not okay.
Doctors in general are just notoriously lazy, and it stems from the way they are taught. They are told to ignore things out of the ordinary because it’s not common but then are unprepared when they do come up and ignore it in real scenarios. They are told to put things in boxes even if it doesn’t really fit and then treat it as is (if they decide to treat it at all).
And many doctors don’t listen to their patients because they simply believe that they know everything. They believe patients are overexaggerating or straight up lying (look up functional neurological disorder and munchausens- which ARE real disorders but vastly overdiagnosed or considered) because they can’t accept a patient may be a better expert on their own body than them who’ve known you for a few minutes.
So yeah, lets stop the idea “oh they studied for so-and-so years so they know better than me” because nobody knows what you’re feeling more than you do.
Let’s all start being more critical of our doctors and holding them to higher standards, and calling out medical abuse/maltreatment when it happens.
my god but I get mad when someone flippantly dismisses important scientific progress because you can make it sound dumb by framing it the right way.
For a start, of course a lot of science sounds dumb. Science is all in the slogging through the minutiae, the failures, the tedious process of filling in the blank spaces on the map because it ain’t ’t glamorous, but if someone doesn’t do it, no one gets to know for sure what’s there.
Someone’s gotta spend their career measuring fly genitalia under a microscope. Frankly, I’m grateful to the person who is tackling that tedium, because if they didn’t, I might have to, and I don’t wanna.
But let’s talk about why we should care about this particular science and spend money on it. (And I’ll even answer without even glancing at the article.)
Off the top of my head?
-advances in robotics
-advances in miniature robotics
-advances in flight technology
-advantages in simulating and understanding the mechanics and programming of small intelligences
-ability to grow crops in places uninhabitable by insects (space? cold/hot? places where honeybees are non-native and detrimental to the ecosystem?)
-ability to improve productivity density of crops and feed more people
-less strain on bees, who do poorly when forced to pollinate monocultures of low nutrition plants
-ability to run tightly controlled experiments on pollination, on the effects of bees on plant physiology, on ecosystem dynamics, etc
-fucking robot bees, my friend
-hahaha think how confused those flowers must be
Also worth keeping in mind? People love, love, love framing science in condescending and silly sounding terms as an excuse to cut funding to vital programs. *Especially* if it’s also associated with something (gasp) ‘inappropriate’, like sex or ladyparts. This is why research for a lot of women’s issues, lgbtq+ issues, minorities’ issues, and vulnerable groups in general’s issues tends to lag so far behind the times. This is why some groups are pushing so hard to cut funding for climate change research these days.
Anything that’s acquired governmental funding has been through and intensely competitive, months-to-years long screening by EXPERTS IN THE FIELD who have a very good idea what research is likely to be most beneficial to that field and fill a needed gap.
Trust me. The paperwork haunts my nightmares.
So, we had a joke in my lab: “Nice work, college boy.” It was the phrase for any project that you could spend years and years working on and end up with results that could be summed up on a single, pretty slide with an apparently obvious graph. The phrase was taken from something a grower said at a talk my advisor gave as a graduate student: “So you proved that plants grow better when they’re watered? Nice work, college boy.”
But like, the thing is? There’s always more details than that. And a lot of times it’s important that somebody questions our assumptions.
A labmate of mine doing very similar research demonstrated that our assumptions about the effect of water stress on plant fitness have been wrong for years because *nobody had thought to separate out the different WAYS a plant can be water stressed.* (Continuously, in bursts, etc.). And it turns out these ways have *drastically different effects* with drastically different measures required for response to them to keep from losing lots of money and resources in agriculture.
Nice work, college boy. :p
Point the second: surprise! Anna Haldewang is an industrial design student. She developed this in her product design class. And, as far as I can tell, she has had no particular funding at all for this project, much less billions of dollars.
‘grats, Anna, you FUCKING ROCK.
ps: On a lighter note, summarizing research to make it sound stupid is both easy AND fun. Check out @lolmythesis – I HIGHLY RECOMMEND. :33
I’d also like to chime in that a chunk of my family are apple farmers, and one thing I learned visiting them is that you can’t always let bees pollinate. With certain apple varieties, people have to go out with little paintbrushes to pollinate them by hand, because if they cross-pollinate with the wrong variety the apples won’t come out the same. Beebots could potentially be a huge time-saver at that task, because depending on how the algorithms work, you could just tell them “Don’t go into the Gala field next door” and let them do the job more efficiently than you without having to worry about getting weird mutant apples.
Also holy shit all science is not interchangeable. Nobody got up one morning and said “instead of saving the bees I’m going to build a bee robot.”
The only problem with those robots is a marketing one. Make ‘em anthropomorphic, like pixies, and people would be all over that shit and want them as pets.
I feel morally obligated to remind everyone, when I see discourse like this, that there are vested interests in destroying the public’s faith in
Evidence-based statements
Publicly-funded science
Critical examination of the media
Affection and investment for the natural world
And this is something I’ve been explaining for years.
And next thing you know it’s 2017 and everyone is surprised that the CDC has been told not to use the words “vulnerable” or “evidence-based” when writing their budgets. And the people running the world are able to deny the effects of climate change while the waters rise. This is how you get hurricanes while people tell you there aren’t any hurricanes. And how conspiracy theories are more attractive than the truth.
We got here on purpose because we wanted to be here. Because cynicism seemed cooler than wonder. Because of course the world is broken so why bother?
Because we didn’t want to be like those wide-eyed nerds and their silly robot bees.
I think I may have rebligged the root post before without particularly examining how counter to my values it is. Though, I do truly hope that scientific research can fix the woes of ailing bees before we have to implement any robot army based solutions.
every time i see this im reminded of the “shrimp on a treadmill” thing that people were lambasted for being a “waste of taxpayer money”. DESPITE the fact that it was like a few thousand dollars MAX and done by a student in university (with a grant provided BY THE UNIVERSITY) to study how the negative water quality in the gulf of mexico caused by the bp spill would affect oxygen processing in shrimp.
which is a SIGNIFICANT part of the fishing industry down there and how some folks literally make their living. it also ties into ecology and conservation since you don’t want to overfish shrimp populations that arent going able to bounce back from it. you also dont want to start resorting to fishing methods that will do more harm to to the environment to try to get bigger hauls to hit basic demand if theres nothing there to catch.
my own research was mostly done out of pocket w a few hundred dollars grant despite the fact that it involved potentially an entirely new mode of sensory input as of yet undiscovered by science that had LOADS of potential applications in biology and robotics. but boil it down to “put a scorpion in a maze in the dark to see if it bumps into walls” on paper and people just kinda roll your eyes at you. hell, i even built my own lab apparatuses and paid for the materials with money from my food budget. (bulk dry spaghetti saved my life)
anytime you see a “lol this science was a waste of money” it’s almost always blatant propaganda to encourage the cutting back of research and the justification of budget cuts. dig a little deeper into “dumb studies” and there’s usually some very nifty applications or hypotheses being tested that have real world applications concerning problems that exist RIGHT NOW.
not to say you shouldnt think critically about WHY something is being studied, but the studies you usually have to look out for are the ones privately funded by groups looking to push an agenda (ones from christian “family” groups on homosexuality/lgbt issues, stuff from people with connections to big oil/etc who do studies on global warming, or on the other end of the political spectrum something from pro-marijuana lobbyist about how marijuana will cure -insertailmenthere-). there could still be good raw data in these studies, assuming it hasnt been altered or data sets excluded, but it will be presented in such a way to make their point so you have to keep that in mind (as well as their methodology and things that could have been intentionally or unintentionally skewing the data, but that goes for any study)
Not OFSDS related, but dog adoption is a pretty important subject to me.
This popped up on my local news that a North Carolina shelter is over capacity and in extreme danger of being required to euthanize some of their pups.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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