Discovery Science 🧬

Why do you never see turkey eggs on shelves? Boiled and fried, in a pie or in a fried egg - chicken eggs can no longer be taken out of our diet. There are also more exotic options for gourmets: duck, quail and even ostrich. But you won't find turkey eggs on any farm. But why? Are feathered competitors really not allowing them into the market? Let's start with the positives. Of course, turkey eggs are much larger than chicken eggs - their weight reaches 70-80 grams (comparison photo 2). This is comparable to the highest category - you rarely even find these in stores! For comparison, the weight of a first-grade egg is from 55 to 65 grams, 1.5 times less! But with all the costs and markups, one, albeit very large, turkey egg costs the same as three packages of chicken eggs - from 350 rubles! Firstly, the turkey begins to lay eggs quite late - already at 7-9 months of life. At this point, chickens have been laying eggs for 2-4 months already! In addition, the difference in quantity is colossal. A young laying hen in her prime produces 5-6 eggs per week. A turkey with the same inputs is capable of producing only 2 eggs in the same period. What’s stopping advertisers from straining themselves and talking about incredible beneficial properties? That's right - their absence! A turkey egg tastes little different from a chicken egg. It contains more protein and some vitamins. But they also contain several times more cholesterol. But this situation does not upset anyone, because birds were never intended to be bred for the sake of omelettes and scrambled eggs. Native Americans hunted turkeys and domesticated them only for meat. The arriving Europeans also appreciated the taste of turkey breast and almost immediately sent the birds home for breeding. For five centuries, selection has gone in two directions: decorative and meat. No one has ever tried to make laying hens from turkeys. So it turns out that birds are centuries behind in the production of eggs! - - - - - We have a huge group, which is 11 years old and there are many zoologists who write tons of text every day from the field in which they are specialists. Due to VK’s failed policy towards authors, all this, unfortunately, rests only on rare advertising and your support. You can support the stability of our nervous system with a minimum subscription of 100 rubles per month. You can request support directly through the button in this post. Thank you! 🏀 Hit the hoop and get an NFT gift — https://t.me/BasketbolX_bot

questionable from an ethical point of view? Fortunately for themselves, foxes know nothing about ethics, so they are guided only by crude practicality. For them, the children of subordinate females are competitors for food. And a male who has disappeared for a long time is either dead, a bungler, or a bad hunter. In any case, in the dangerous and complex world of small predators you cannot raise offspring with such a thing! Author: Yaroslav Ilyin 🏀 Hit the hoop and get an NFT gift — https://t.me/BasketbolX_bot

Fox weddings: How do red-haired cheats cheat even during the mating season? The cunning of foxes is not only widely known - it is legendary. Cheats easily evade pursuit, are excellent at confusing their tracks, and know a huge variety of ways to obtain food. They mouse, steal bird eggs, ambush hare trails, and even destroy muskrat huts to get to sleepy and resting homeowners. But in the spring, when the breeding season begins, the chanterelles become simply devilishly inventive. Like any good adventure, this one begins with a lot of preparation. Immediately before the start of the mating season - in January, February or March, depending on the region of residence - the female finds or digs several burrows in her territory. After all, she understands perfectly well that a girl with her own living space is a much more desirable prize than an ordinary homeless cheat. The female then places many scent marks along the boundaries of her territory and screams loudly to attract as many males as possible. And they are really attracted. Moreover, males are not fools either and leave their marks next to the marks of females - to show that the place has already been taken, and you’d better go home, baby. This really works on young males weakened by disease: they often retreat, not daring to participate in the competition for the paw and heart. Those males who decide to take a risk descend to the lowest type of mating games - to a banal fight among themselves. They will bite and scratch until the strongest male drives everyone else away and is left alone with the lady. However, the losers will still have a chance to prove themselves... Of course, the female will accept the courtship of the winner. And she will even give him a corner in her burrow so that they can temporarily become a full-fledged family and can raise from 2 to 6 puppies. He will also call several homeless subordinate foxes who do not have their own territory and live with the owner of the allotment. These homeless maids are often the mistress’s children from a previous marriage and help their parents raise their offspring. And the fox will carefully ensure that they do not have children of their own - she does not need competitors. Sometimes it even comes to killing their offspring... But the male still plays the main role in raising children. He has a very pronounced paternal instinct, so he is selflessly devoted to his children and his manipulative wife. But she doesn’t tell him. If the male disappears for too long, the fox declares him dead and begins to look for a replacement from among its neighbors. And she finds it quickly, especially if she hasn’t given birth yet. Since foxes have not yet invented pregnancy tests and do not know how to count, they easily mistake other people's offspring for their children. And then, if the male does return home, he sees how his beautiful daughter-in-law is happy with another... Needless to say, such behavior is, to put it mildly,

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<b>Spanish dancer: 2 kg of toxic biomass. What is it? </b> When some predator approaches the Spanish dancer, he turns from a sluggish and slow, but very bright overgrown pancake into a magnificent dancer from whom it is impossible to take his eyes off! With its appearance alone, it attracts the attention of all the fish in the area. One thing is not clear: does this really help you survive? Yes, and how! There is a very ancient and unspoken rule in nature: if an animal looks deliberately bright, then it is poisonous. And the more attention it attracts, the more inedible it becomes. By this logic, the Spanish dancer must be the most poisonous creature on the planet! Only he's lying a little. The Spanish Dancer does not produce any form of poison, but it does feed on poisonous sea sponges, to whose toxins it is immune. This poison is deposited in all its organs and tissues. But there is a nuance - the sponges themselves use it to drive away small invertebrates and fish. Therefore, purely theoretically, large fish and crustaceans can dine on a half-meter pancake weighing up to 2 kilograms. But they don't do this. After all, the dancer tastes so disgusting that even a person with his outstanding ability to eat inedible things could not figure out how to make a flat mollusk at least edible. There are only two predators that can eat the dancer - the wrasse and the hermit crab - but even they choose any other alternative to the toxic bright sniffle. The Spanish dancer, as you understand, is completely satisfied with such conditions. Millions of years ago, he populated all the coral reefs of the western regions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, where he simply enjoys his moral and physical superiority over predators. And he doesn’t notice that someone else is using it... Emperor shrimps - bright red crustaceans up to 3 centimeters long - often live on the backs of Spanish dancers, where they sit among the protruding gills of the mollusk and rest calmly. The shrimp are not poisonous and stand out with their red shell even against the backdrop of colorful coral reefs, but it is almost impossible to see them on the back of a dancer. And even if they see it, what will you do with them? The dancers’ eggs, by the way, are also bright red, and the clutch also looks like a beautiful flower that catches the eye. And the logic here is the same: The poison from the “mother’s” body seeps into the eggs, turning a potential delicacy into a completely inedible dish. By the way, the eggs will hatch into amazingly funny little eared creatures - veliger larvae. I’m sure most of you noticed that I put the word “mother” in quotation marks. And it was not just like that. All dancers are hermaphrodites, males and females in one bottle, therefore, when they meet, they fertilize each other and both individuals lay eggs. Which is very convenient if all representatives of your species are slow bottom pancakes! Author: Yaroslav Ilyin <b>🏀 Hit the hoop and get an

This could be a wonderful story of the reunion of two brothers, due to circumstances separated by time and space. One grew up angry and inadequate. He experienced life on the street and has a bunch of criminal connections. The other is a cozy homebody who loves cleanliness, order and respect for his neighbors. 🏀 Hit the hoop and get an NFT gift — https://t.me/BasketbolX_bot

Smear yourself with disgust: Why do cigarettes, alcohol and perfume drive hedgehogs crazy? 99% of the time the hedgehog behaves absolutely adequately. It hides from predators and eats invertebrates, snakes and mice. Males fight for females, and females are thrilled by the abundance of attention. But if a hedgehog stumbles upon a cigarette butt, something in him will change. Instead of a timid and wary small predator, an obsessed one will appear, who will wheeze, bleed foamy saliva and smear it on his back. Did cigarettes drive him crazy? Answer: yes, they did. But not because hedgehogs are poisoned by the toxin and frantically get high on it, but because cigarette butts have a pungent, pronounced odor. It is this, and not the addiction, that causes hedgehogs to have a strong desire to lick the cigarette butt and rub saliva all over themselves. And if in place of the cigarette there was another source of strong odor - a fragrant flower, cotton wool with perfume or a crab stick - the small predator would fall into exactly the same frenzy. Which scientists call self-washing or self-lubrication. Self-washing is a unique behavior common to all hedgehogs, but only to them. And this is partly why we still do not understand what its biological benefits are, but this does not stop scientists from building hypotheses. According to one hypothesis, hedgehogs’ love for strange strong odors is one of the factors in their camouflage. After all, if a hedgehog smells not like a hedgehog, but like gasoline, iron or a pile of feces, then it becomes impossible to find it by smell. True, such a disguise can also turn against a hedgehog, because there is always a chance of swallowing parasites or sipping toxic liquids, of which humanity has invented an awful lot. Another option is that hedgehogs communicate this way. The strong smell serves as a beacon for them, allowing the secretive animals to find each other during the breeding season, which for ordinary hedgehogs will begin in the coming days. And, importantly, this idea does not contradict the previous one! Well, I like the third theory more than all the others: hedgehogs are driven by... curiosity! They smear themselves with a new smell not for communication, and not to hide from enemies, but to remember the new smell for the rest of their lives. In the wild, everything unfamiliar is a priori dangerous, and learning a new smell is a sure way not to fall into a stupor and not become stupid when meeting it later! All that remains is to understand: how to determine which hypothesis is correct? Author: Yaroslav Ilyin 🏀 Hit the hoop and get an NFT gift — https://t.me/BasketbolX_bot

Shchiten seems to me the most incredible person you can meet in a village, at a dacha or any other place in the middle zone. Strange creatures can appear completely unexpectedly in any puddle and also suddenly disappear. They live ONLY in puddles and it is impossible to predict their appearance. Cysts (eggs) can lie in the soil for many decades until suddenly, for some unknown reason, they decide that the conditions are suitable for hatching. For a couple of weeks, maximum a month, they fiddle around in the puddle, quickly multiply and disappear as suddenly as they appeared. Have you ever met a shieldbill in your life? If yes, then it’s interesting to read your encounter stories. 🏀 Hit the hoop and get an NFT gift — https://t.me/BasketbolX_bot