I often listen to NPR during my shorter car commute time. Longer drives require the magic of audio books on my Kindle to keep me focused and awake. I am mostly over talking on the phone and especially texting as I drive. I was amazed last week to hear that one of my associates actually passed a car on Highway 55 and the driver was holding their Ipad on the steering wheel while they were driving down that road. You hear about examples of the Darwin award in action – the strong or smart will survive. Our multi tasking society puts us as risk from those that actually believe they can effectively do more than one thing at a time.
Back to NPR. A recent story caught my attention. Biologists have long wondered why there are so many egg shapes, especially in birds. Hummingbirds have eggs shaped like Tic-Tacs. Birds called Murres produce eggs shaped like big tear drops. Some eggs are more like ping pong balls. It appears that Biologist Mary Caswell Stoddard of Princeton University in collaboration with an international team of scientists has “cracked” the mystery. Putting aside the many age old theories: cone shaped eggs don’t roll away, they roll in a tight circle so maybe that’s good for birds that nest on cliffs. Or elliptical eggs, like slightly flattened spheres, might stack closer in nests to incubate better. Stoddard looked at nearly 50,000 eggs and cross-checked them with 1400 bird species. “We were able to look at the many dimensions and solve the mystery” said Stoddard. “Egg shape appears to be related to flight ability in birds. Take chickens. They’re lousy fliers, with more oval shaped eggs. But eggs from long distance-migrating birds tended to be quite different–good fliers tend to lay more elliptical eggs.” Perhaps to validate the theory a bit more, consider the penguin – marathon “flyers” through the water – and yes they also have elongated eggs.
One of nature’s most efficient life support systems is the egg. Eggs evolved over 300 million years ago as vertebrate animals adapted to living on land. Since that time there have been numerous efforts to educate our children about eggs and who lays them. I am tempted to say there have been a lot of “eggs” laid in recent Tweets but that would be off subject. My favorite educator is Dr. Suess – he has written Horton the Elephant Hatches an Egg and so many other humorous rhyming tales. My children and now Hank are subjected to Suess on a regular basis and I think they loved and love it. I close with a bit of Cat in the Hat’s sage advice:
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.
You’re on your own.
And you know what you know.
And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go.
As we celebrate the birth of our nation I am reminded about the pioneers who envisioned a new world and had to courage to lead the way.
Enjoy the fourth. Mike