[HN Gopher] Why Is the Kiwi's Egg So Big?
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Why Is the Kiwi's Egg So Big?
Author : repost_bot
Score : 71 points
Date : 2025-05-01 19:58 UTC (2 days ago)
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| LeonB wrote:
| Kiwis also have a larger brain than other birds their size.
|
| The causes and consequences of this are worth investigating.
|
| A lot of animals have an architecture where they can't carry a
| large brain, so a slightly larger brain is more of a hindrance
| than a help.
|
| Bipedal animals can balance a heavier brain on their upright
| frame. But flying animals can't afford too much extra weight.
|
| I'm not sure what they do with the extra brain cells, but I
| suspect that their specially evolved nostrils would benefit from
| a powerful processing unit.
|
| (Pigs for example have a large brain both in comparison to their
| body and in comparison to all other animals. I think the extra
| processing there is largely to support their incredible
| proboscis. Eg their legendary truffle hunting skills.)
|
| I think our early human ancestor's big brain was particularly
| useful for visual processing to assist with bipedal
| running/hunting.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Pigs undoubtedly have a better sense of smell than us, but it's
| unclear if it's really "better" than dogs. Pigs in truffle
| hunting is a bit of a misconception. Wild boars might be able
| to find them sometimes, but the best truffle hunters are dogs.
| In attempts to quantify "sense of smell" pigs ranked lower than
| mice and way lower than elephants.
|
| So, no, I don't think the large brain is to do with smell. I
| think it's more to do with them being quite similar to us which
| is apparent if you ever encountered a pig. What people do to
| them is horrible and they don't deserve it.
| sdiupIGPWEfh wrote:
| Acknowledging that my own reading of the situation may be
| flawed, I'd though the situation was that pigs on average are
| better at sniffing out truffles, but dogs are the better
| truffle hunters on account of being "good enough" and the
| fact that dogs, unlike pigs, aren't going to eat half the
| truffles they find.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| No one here seems to have any idea what they are talking
| about about. 1. You put a ring in the pig nose so it
| doesn't root and eat the truffles, 2. Dogs have a better
| sense of smells than pigs by a lot, 3. Big brains don't
| come from standing upright, whales and dolphins have larger
| brains, 3. Brain size is important for intelligence, almost
| always the larger brain the more intelligent, the whole
| nonsense of body to brain ratio be more important was to
| make half the human population not feel as bad about having
| smaller brains. Almost always, more brain == more smart.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Buddy, you have no clue what you're talking about.
| Smithalicious wrote:
| That's why I refuse to take blue whales on in chess
| pyrale wrote:
| Brain size alone isn't a great indicator of performance. See
| for instance Neanderthal vs. Sapiens.
| bregma wrote:
| Alex: My pig has no nose.
|
| Anna: How does he smell?
|
| Alex: Terrible.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Today I learned the distinction between the kiwi bird and the
| kiwifruit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwifruit
|
| I had always thought the latter to be a New Zealand fruit that is
| the source of the name "kiwi".
|
| No, kiwifruit is Chinese. The more you know.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| You were right actually. Yes it's Chinese, but it was
| popularized by New Zealand - hence the name !
|
| The history of agriculture in New Zealand is very interesting -
| for such a small country, they sure figured out how to do it
| well and quite often in very innovative ways.
|
| It's also the country that pretty much 'invented' farm raised
| venison.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| There's a streak of Dutch through the New Zealand
| demographic, and the Dutch have been famously fabulous
| farmers in at least some of the places they've inhabited.
|
| Netherlands, South Africa, New Zealand, Tasmania and Victoria
| in Australia, and at least some US states that are famous for
| agriculture: California, Illinois, Nebraska, Iowa.
| metalman wrote:
| yep, we got em here in Nova Scotia, "little dutch farmers",
| still doing the dutch beard thing, farming with oxen, deap
| knowledge of traditional farming practice, oh how they can
| talk, and bend your ear, best pay attention, as if they
| like you, they will drop a significant observation into an
| otherwise seemingly pointless ramble, but as they
| say....you have to catch it get them in Pennsylvania too,
| though less obviously out of a clasic painting from the
| 17th century
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| The Dutch largely arrived here post WW2, we were doing a
| bunch of agriculture before then, rest assured.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Didn't the Dutch acquire New York back in 1613?
| nelblu wrote:
| I'd give credit to the Hobbits, they were great farmers!
| markdown wrote:
| I've seen the word "kiwi" used to refer to the fruit in the US,
| which just seems odd to me, like calling a pineapple a pine. In
| my part of teh world its a kiwifruit, not a kiwi.
|
| A kiwi is a New Zealander. In fact while they're both named
| after the bird, the bird is more often called a kiwi bird than
| just a kiwi.
| rat87 wrote:
| Yes us Americans just say kiwis instead of kiwifruits. Not
| too many kiwi birds or New Zealanders in the states so
| there's not much confusion
| zimpenfish wrote:
| UK people also mostly just call it "kiwi" instead of
| "kiwifruit". Similar lack of kiwi birds but we do have a
| fair few kiwi people (at least in London.)
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| As a New Zealander, it seems like everywhere other than NZ
| the default is calling it a "kiwi" instead of "kiwifruit"
| mort96 wrote:
| I think this is more or less correct. Presumably because
| the need to distinguish between kiwi fruits and New
| Zealanders is less important in most other places than in
| NZ.
| danielbln wrote:
| German here, it's exclusively Kiwi here, never Kiwifrucht
| (kiwifruit).
| mr_toad wrote:
| I've never heard of anyone calling it a kiwi bird, in NZ or
| anywhere else.
| FredPret wrote:
| Maybe it's handling the eggs that taught the Kiwis rugby
| n20benn wrote:
| Feels like the animal kingdom opposite of the panda--adults weigh
| upwards of 300 pounds, but baby panda birth weights are just
| under 1/3 of a pound.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| This puts them in approximately the same magnitude of order as
| kangaroos.
|
| A male Red Kangaroo can weigh upwards of 92kg and stand around
| the 1.8m (6 feet) mark. Some are over two metres tall. I've
| seen a couple giants, well over two metres and biceps as big as
| my thigh. Anyways, kangaroo sucklings typically way less than
| one gram.
|
| Although they are special case of mammal.
|
| Kangaroos are also comically dumb.
| HocusLocus wrote:
| Why does the Porridge Bird lay its egg in the air?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmWFrMq3qNY&t=1457s
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| In summary, they thought it was an evolutionary anachronism, a
| large egg left over from a larger body size because of assumed
| relationships with larger ratites like Moas. But subsequent
| genetic and fossil research challenged that.
|
| The article mentions an emerging view it is about "precocity" -
| larger and better developed babies, and extra yolk being able to
| provide nutrition to the baby for longer.
| jumploops wrote:
| This led me down a ChatGPT rabbit hole of trying to figure out
| how long it would take kiwis to convergently evolve into
| humanoids...
|
| Unrelated, I'm starting a new co called "Super-Kiwi" -- time-to-
| market is ~200-300 million years.
| kergonath wrote:
| ChatGPT has no clue, you should not have bothered and instead
| have a read on Wikipedia.
|
| Considering that humans evolved out of what were effectively
| mice at the end of the Cretaceous (~62M years ago), 200M seems
| wildly out of proportion. Of course you'd still need the right
| evolutionary pressure and tweak your definition of humanoid.
| jumploops wrote:
| > ChatGPT has no clue
|
| Yes, and neither did I!
|
| I simply asked o3 (after learning about kiwis), if, given
| that our common ancestor was ~300m years old, would it be
| possible in the same time frame (assuming it would be).
|
| o3 vehemently disagreed:
|
| > Not impossible, <bold>just very, very unlikely.</bold>
|
| I then learned about Dollo's law of irreversibility[0], and
| onto stick bugs regrowing wings, etc.
|
| Eventually we got to computational estimates for simulation
| of evolution, which it then got very defensive about:
|
| >"<bold>Utterly out of reach</bold> today.. "
|
| My takeaway is that LLMs are a lot more human (thinking in
| the present), than one might assume an AGI to be.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| I've read somewhere that Kiwis are in the running for being one
| of the closest genetic descendants / relatives of the T. rex and
| if they ever get off New Zealand and are relieved of the island
| dwarfism pressure...
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Can't a billionaire buy a huge island, build a sanctuary, and
| relieve some kiwis of this pressure? Kids a million years from
| now will still want to see T-Rexs
| ben_w wrote:
| Larger than _New Zealand_?
|
| The two main parts of the country are the 12th and 14th
| largest islands on the planet:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_by_area
| bbarnett wrote:
| You need a really big island, like North America.
| mort96 wrote:
| Is NA really an island? I always thought it was a
| peninsula on the coast of Central America
| layer8 wrote:
| In that case, it's almost more plausible to count the
| Panama canal as a strait.
| nkrisc wrote:
| By that measure there's only one continent with a very,
| very large saltwater lake.
| bregma wrote:
| I heard a wealthy man is looking to buy Greenland. Maybe
| it's for the birds?
| arp242 wrote:
| New Zealand is nowhere near small enough for island dwarfism.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Maybe, although a more correct term is _insular dwarfism_ ,
| whereby populations are supposedly subject if they're
| isolated in anyway.
|
| Definitely not my area of expertise though, purely a fun
| speculation.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Not super knowledgeable either, but I'm thinking that it's
| simply because it's fairly easy for animals to change size.
| Like imagine a size constant in your code and you can just
| update it and everything magically works. So when you have
| two populations that get cut off with slighly different
| environments and selection pressures their sizes are likely
| to diverge.
| chris1993 wrote:
| Moa seemed to contradict this
| cenamus wrote:
| What about island gigantism? With no large scale predator, you
| can just grow bigger
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