Cracking the mystery of egg shape | Hacker News Reader

Cracking the mystery of egg shape

vis.sciencemag.org

77 pointsohjeez20 comments

This article is a great example of fun and engaging presentation, but alas spoiled by poor writing. The top 3/4 of the article, which explains the question and makes you care about it, is clear and exciting. It's the sort of page you want to show your friends and your kids. But the ending—the explanation of the solution—falls flat. I challenge anyone to reach the end of this article with a clear understanding of what the scientists mentioned in the article actually concluded.

The problem begins with the paragraph, "What’s the link between flying and egg shape? Birds have a streamlined body plan, and—especially in stronger fliers—their organs are squashed and minimized." The paragraphs that follow this one do a poor job of explaining the model. What the author is trying to say, I think, is that the females of strong fliers, because they have narrow bodies, have narrow oviducts and therefore narrow (and pointy) eggs. That hardly seems an earth (or egg) shattering conclusion. But then we have this: "But it also turns out that egg shape is a balance between two pressures..." a sentence I can't find the significance of. And this fun fact: "If you carefully remove the shell from the membrane, an egg will still retain its shape." Does "egg" there refer to the shell, the membrane, or something else? Clearer, I think, would have been: "If you carefully remove the shell from the membrane, the remaining egg even without the shell will still retain its shape." By the end, I'm left with a cracked and mushy solution to a beautiful and pristine problem.

I wanted to read that then the trying too hard ui made it impossible... at least on mobile.

That's too bad, on desktop it's pretty good. Though not really necessary, I mean as far as I can tell it doesn't add anything functional.

They did a good job for sure, functions the exact same on desktop as mobile now that I am back home. But I just want information in linear and boring manner.

Right now I'm cracking the mystery behind the presentation of this page. A lot of things is going on there

I have mixed feelings about this presentation style. On the one hand, it takes advantage of the computer medium nicely. On the other, it seems very content-sparse. It grabs attention, but it doesn't seem to convey much information.

Fascinating. love the occasional HN insights.

That web site is all flashy presentation, I couldn't tell if there was any actual information hidden amongst the animations.

TLDR anyone?

> After crunching the numbers, the scientists found the links they’d been looking for: the length of an egg correlates with bird body size. The shape of an egg—how asymmetrical or elliptical it is—relates to flying habits. And the stronger a bird's flight, the more asymmetrical or elliptical its eggs will be.

> What’s the link between flying and egg shape? Birds have a streamlined body plan, and—especially in stronger fliers—their organs are squashed and minimized.

The presentation seemed well done and I’m looking in mobile. Basically if you crunch all the data there do seem to be strong correlations between length and bird size on the one hand and shape with flying habits on the other. Various other hypothesized factors don’t seem to play a major role.

Interesting article, but I don't think they presented a causal link?

My take away was that researchers produced evidence that the shape of bird eggs is optimized, around physical characteristics of the parent. I am open to the idea and sceptical. In the context of humans it would be like saying the shape of children is optimized around the physical characteristics of a womans body, as opposed the the supposition that a womans body is optimized around the physical characteristics of children it will have to give birth to.

Well, they're competitively co-evolved; human head size at birth really is limited by maternal survivability.

Ha, literal "chicken and egg" framing.

OK, your idea is parent optimized for physical characteristics of progeny, or in this case, the parent is formed by the egg, not the egg by the parent?

In this article, your point would be, because of laying conical eggs, certain species of birds were able to nest on cliffs. So their eggs not rolling made them cliff dwellers?

And similarly, elliptical eggs optimized their mothers for faster flight?

Not sure. Put like that, I'm thinking it's reasonable the parent trying to roost on the cliff came first.

Children are in fact born well before the level of development other mammals reach before birth and with soft skulls so they can fit through the opening.

the tl;dr is the source: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6344/1249

There's a PDF of it available as well: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/356/6344/1249.full...

If the birds often fly then their eggs tend to be longer, because of the streamlined bodyshape.

If the eggs are layed on cliffs, then they are conical so they don't roll and fall.

And the thickness of the inner egg membrane plays a role in defining the shape while it's being pressed out.

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