Oldest known wild bird lays egg at 74 | Hacker News Reader

Oldest known wild bird lays egg at 74

bbc.co.uk

238 pointsGeoAtreides110 comments

Awesome. If they start breeding at 5, and she's already nearly 75, then potentially she lived to see a (grand)^13-child of herself being hatched. And her (grand)^13-child will still see a (grand)^12-uncle/aunt hatch.

Some other animals

  | Animal        | Lifespan          | Breeding Frequency         | Potential Generations They Can Witness|
  |---------------|-------------------|----------------------------|---------------------------------------|
  | Turtles       | Over 100 years    | Every few years            | 10-20 generations                     |
  | Whales        | Over 200 years    | Every 2-5 years            | 20-30 generations                     |
  | Koi Fish      | Over 200 years    | Multiple times a year      | 30-50 generations                     |
  | Elephants     | 60-70 years       | Every 4-5 years            | 10-15 generations                     |

Forget about trees, which breed annually and you can find 10-100+ generations around a mother tree; fungi (similar); or bacteria, which can witness 1000+ generations in its lifetime

And Jonathan the tortoise is believed to be the oldest land animal at 192 years old [1]

When I was a kid (I'm 51 y/o now) I remember learning that there were still one or two tortoise alive that were born before the... French revolution (1789).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_(tortoise)

meanwhile, the immortal jellyfish:

Define "witness" ;)

To gain an understanding of the implicit definition of his use of this word, I suggest you go read some literature. There exist a whole host of literature that are witness to a broad and eclectic vernacular. :)

unexpected exponent

in bagging area

Yeah, I would've expected something like /(great-){13}grandchild/, tbh...

Which is less readable than using a basic carat, but hey, it shows your 1337 LaTeX skill

unexpected measure of purity

...why not do it this way: great^{13} ?

When humans reproduce at higher ages, the odds of issues and abnormalities increase. Does the same happen with birds?

That's a good question. A quick scan of the literature suggests that in some birds the answer is no. I believe this is thought to be due to the evolutionary constraints of flying.

"Some seabird species exhibit extremely slow age-related declines in both survival and reproductive output, and even increase reproductive success as they get older. Slow avian senescence is thought to be coupled evolutionarily with delayed maturity and low annual fecundity. " [1]

"Long-term population studies of wild seabirds (e.g. terns, gulls and albatrosses) suggest that these species show little or no decline in reproductive output, even when increasing mortality rates suggest the occurrence of senescence in other systems." [2]

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S05315... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S05315...

74 seems incredibly old! Is there a chance someone has been swapping the tags to mess with the researchers?!

At least recently, there are enough photos of this bird that any tag-swapping would have been noticed.

Might not be true back in the 50's/60's/70's though, although back then there would be far less reason to do any swapping.

>although back then there would be far less reason to do any swapping

Why?

The bird was less famous then.

Is not probable, but not impossible

In theory a soldier or fishermen could have accidentally killed the first bird and reassign the tag at the sea, but I think that we could safely discard that because in that case, the female would have changed its nest location suddenly that year. Even more strange, would have changed its partner also.

To re-tag a bird that also occupy the same nest as the first bird, we would need typically to do it in the nest area. That would need a scientist (typically as the number of people visiting those remote places is scarce), and one with a known name. A daughter of the bird could have occupied the empty nest spot.

But this is all speculation, of course. Marks on the bird could provide the required info. With mammals with spots is much easier, each animal has a different pattern. With Albatross, the valid patterns could be on the face leg scales or in some scars.

After death the bones could be read also for confirm the age, but DNA analysis should be the weapon of choice in this cases.

This bird would not have been the oldest known wild bird.

Some bird species can live quite long, especially for their size, compared to mammals. 120 gram lories and parakeets can live to 30 years in captivity. They appear to keep breeding until they die.

There are sulphur-crested cockatoos (a type of large Australian parrot) that are documented to have made it over 100 years.

I love these specific species of Albatross! So beautiful! They remind me of an the western gull; except bigger and not as loud.

74! Wowzers. I know someone who has a ~45 year old Goffin cockatoo, which has now survived multiple owners' passing! Who would have thought you need to consider a "legacy plan" for a pet bird?! haha

As a random aside, we play various pop/electronic music for the bird and she very happily/avidly dances to it. :)

I was shocked to read about the maximum lifespans for some birds in captivity. It seems like they’re all built for extremely long lives! Birds that live to 80 in captivity are not uncommon at all. Really threw me for a loop

Hope they give this poor Goffin a well deserved partner after all this time. Disco music definitely can help with that first date

then you wonder how old dinosaurs got ?

Isn’t the distinction sort of moot at this point? I seem to remember things setting into a “birds = dinosaurs” paradigm, although I am almost certainly oversimplifying things.

Birds are a subset of dinosaurs; not all dinosaurs were birds, though all current dinosaurs are birds.

I thought crocodiles counted? They are related to birds, but clearly are not birds.

OneZoom.org has a nice common ancestor search feature. Here are the results for albatross and crocodile:

https://www.onezoom.org/life/@Archelosauria=4947372?otthome=...

When clicking the link, I just get an error saying the species is not in the DB.

dzonga didn't bring up any distinction. On the contrary. An old bird breeding naturally raises questions about the lifespans of non-avian dinosaurs, because they are related.

> Isn’t the distinction sort of moot at this point? I seem to remember things setting into a “birds = dinosaurs” paradigm, although I am almost certainly oversimplifying things.

Birds are dinosaurs. Specifically they’re the avian branch of the theropods. Distinction has to do with hip bone structure – for lizards the hip joint goes out sideways, for dinosaurs and birds it goes down (iirc). Then dinosaurs have that big bone between their legs whereas for birds it developed into a keel-bone I believe.

We know dinosaurs had to have been sortof-birds because for a lizard to reach that size it would’ve had to live hundreds of years. Whereas birds have a period of rapid growth when young, which enables them to reach near full adult size in a single breeding season.

Basically: All birds are dinosaurs but not all dinosaurs are birds.

Albatrosses are beautiful creatures. They mate for life. Sadly, many are caught in long-line fishing -- just another example of how we destroy everything that is beautiful in the world.

"A conservative calculation of the number of albatrosses killed annually on Japanese longlines in southern oceans in 44 000." [1]

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/000632...

I’ve basically stopped eating fish now: most fish is mass-hunted from unsustainable populations, farmed fish has horrible problems with disease, and there’s huge collatoral damage against other sea-based life.

It's hunting wild game at an industrial, global, scale, for billions of people among hundreds of countries and expecting things will magically work themselves out indefinitely, with strong emphasis on "magically work". This is certainly a dumb idea.

Some like to imagine this is defensible. We've all learned the futility of disputing with people's imaginations.

I'd rather things weren't this way as well. Seafood is delicious

Absolutely right. I would be happy to eat fish once and a while but only if I caught one myself. People imagine it is defensible because (a) the cognitive dissonance is too great for most and (b) industrial civilization has made it so that industrial farming is the only easy way to live.

Some people say, "then go live on a farm and grow it yourself". But the problem is that even today, to get any land, you have to have a lot of money first, which means working to further the system again. There is no recourse for the poor who might even choose a different life if that were an option.

No, the problem with everyone livivng off the land is that is incredibly inefficient. On the other hand, we have subsidized every kind of farming to such an extent that it now cannot survive without the induced demand. There are thousands of livelihoods today that depend on the process that is destroying livelihoods of tomorrow.

> No, the problem with everyone livivng off the land is that is incredibly inefficient.

True, but only in a world with so many people. The alternative is something efficient but destructive.

I’m not trying to be preachy, just take issue with the idea that there is no way for the poor to avoid eating factory farmed meat - at a bare minimum, we can agree that vegetarianism is possible, no?

> We've all learned the futility of disputing with people's imaginations.

Certainly not. I myself have to relearn this lesson over and over, not to mention people who are still out here trying to change hearts and minds with emotional and rational arguments.

See also "you can't get someone to understand something when their salary (or identity or emotional wellbeing etc.) depends on them not understanding: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary

I think "emotional well-being" is especially crucial here, more than salary even.

I think you're right, and I've decided that the same is true for meat, in that large animals are basically in the same category as us in terms of morality, ie I don't know where the line goes but it's not ok to kill them.

However, I am a massive hypocrite and I don't let my moral thoughts bother my everyday consumption patterns.

Try starting with one less meat meal a week. When that no longer feels difficult, try one less meal again.

Even if you don't settle on a meat-free diet, any reduction in consumption makes a huge difference en masse.

I had the same thought actually - what did it for me was realizing that I started to eat meat 3 times a day - breakfast, lunch and dinner all had meat in them, almost always. But when I was growing up in Poland, you'd have meat maybe 2-3 times a week - not because we were poor, but purely because no one looked at a meal of vegetable dumplings(or many other meat-free dishes) as something worse compared to meat - it had the same cultural status as a porkchop. But now I live in the UK and not eating meat for dinner is almost immediately seen as weird, or "oh you're a vegeterian now?" - no....I just don't eat meat for every meal? Why is this immediately seen as suspicious? And again, no one in Poland ever thought of these meals as "vegetarian" - they were just normal meals, not a special lifestyle choice.

My parents both grew up on farms and for them meat was something you had on Sundays. The belief that a meal is only complete with meat seems pretty new.

Do you have any recommendations/recipes for vegan Polish dishes (i.e. dishes that happen to be vegan)?

Vegetarian dishes are common. Vegan dishes are a tiny bit more rare.

- Pickle soup is a classic (use a recipe with fermented pickles, which are pretty easy to make at home, but larger grocers often also sell them refrigerated as a kosher product). Aside from the sour cream it's naturally vegan, and a vegan sour cream might work fine.

- Borscht is a delicious beet soup.

- Wild mushroom perogies are also pretty close, save for egg and sour cream in the dough. Vegan substitutes would definitely work there, else if you experiment a bit with the hydration a basic hot water and flour dough would be close.

- Cabbage soup is similar to pickle soup in spirit (using sauerkraut, another lacto-fermented vegetable).

- Placki Ziemniaczane (somewhat similar to US hash browns) is often served with mushroom sauce. Sometimes it'll have egg as a binder, but that's not essential for a very similar dish (replace it if you'd like, or add a bit more flour and water, or just leave it out).

- Braised sauerkraut

- Krupnik is a barley soup, often made with meat stocks, but vegetable stocks aren't bad either.

Thanks!

But remember that Polish beet soup has often milk or cream added on it. If is pink it has milk. If is purple not necessarily.

That's a fair callout. I think the best borschts I've eaten had dairy, but somehow I had bright purple soups in mind when I wrote that and forgot about the others.

With any luck, a vegan sour cream ought to get you to that pink classic. No promises though, and the purple version is also great.

I'm not an expert on Polish dishes, but I learned that it's pretty easy to make any dish vegan if you are an average cook. If you live in a bigger cities, you'll find many meat alternatives. Pick the ones that you think comes closest to replace the meat in your dish. Replace butter with olive oil or margerine. Replace milk with oat milk (or soy milk).

Replacing cheese is the hardest, but there are increasingly better options now.

Deep fry tofu squares in potato starch. Eat them with rice and broccoli.

Dip the tofu in spicy red Korean paste sauce or skiyaki sauce.

Question for vegans, are they allowed to eat bread (on account of the yeast)?

Assuming this question comes in good faith (because I had many bad faithed questions of this type, unfortunately): Yes.

It is in good faith. I don't understand why though?

Vegans avoid eating animals. Yeast is a fungus.

Exactly.

Funnily enough, same question is often asked of devout Muslims, since your average loaf of bread is 1-2% ABV, and the answer is also yes, yes you are.

Why is the answer yes in that case?

Because leading Islamic scholars have decided it's ok. Just like leading Jewish scholars have decided that even the most orthodox Jews can drink fresh water, even though all water everywhere in the world contains microscopic creusteceans. Religions and belief systems don't have to be perfectly logical(not in the "ah gotcha" scope anyway).

To be fair, all that does to me is highlight the inconsistency and illogicality of these archaic religious customs, which were rooted in sanitation concerns at a time when no one knew what bacteria was, but have become venerated as part of a global control mechanism by the elite.

Every good cult needs a list of low-stakes, illogical rituals, because they serve as nuclei for adherence to higher-stakes illogical beliefs and acts.

Unfortunately, science has made it increasingly difficult to justify the absolutism of many of these religious practices, and so somehow these religions skate by by saying, "oh we're just being practical and realistic" even though they continue to stray further from the dogma which defines their religious beliefs.

It shows you unequivocally that these religious institutions are more interested in maintaining power than adhering to their own belief systems.

Culture and chemistry are separate entities.

It’s not a religion, nothing is allowed or forbidden.

But yes, bread is usually part of a vegan diet.

Ten people halving their meat intake has more positive impact than four people going full vegan. Unfortunately the idea of "less meaty" dining is entirely unknown where I live, it's either completely meatless or meat as the defining element with some sides as fillers. Meatless is high status (even if hated by some), meat-heavy is high status (even if hated by others), but simply does not happen, except perhaps behind closed doors.

I have found that sometimes with a vegetarian diet I feel like I need more protein. But a balance I've found that works is 1-2 meat meals per month is enough to balance it out.

I felt the same way when I started reducing meat. But then I started substituting it with Whey protein and Greek yogurt, and now I eat meat once in 3 to 4 weeks.

Make sure you get a lot of beans. They are pretty good on protein.

How do you notice that you need more protein? I hear that quite a bit but I have no idea how it manifests.

"basically in the same category as us in terms of morality". Nah. I use intelligence as a proxy for capacity to suffer. So eating a monkey is worse than eating a cow, which is worse than eating a fish or chicken.

Environmental impact is another facet tho.

If you just think "eating all animals is 100% horrible" then you're not facing the nuances of reality. You can make a realistic change like eating a bit less whales and cows and eat chickens instead. It's not perfect but it's better.

With your all or nothing thinking you might also want to avoid eating all eggs because egg farms are so inhumane for the chickens. Whereas if you buy the eggs where the chickens are treated better like free range, it's still bad but it's far better. And you're helping shape the industry.

> you're not facing the nuances of reality.

Why not?

And how did you come up with your taxonomy on animal intelligence and acceptable amount of suffering to inflict them?

> egg farms are so inhumane

Because they are? Industrial cages don’t even have enough space for the chicken to turn around. They are spent after a year of laying eggs and slaughtered for meat. Hatched chicks that are male are ground alive. Chickens get their beaks (that has a lot of nerves in it) sliced off without anesthesia. They get pumped full of antibiotics because diseases are rampant in high density farming. Chicken breast chickens are engineered to grow huge breasts too fast and they can’t even stand up.

Industrial farming is the worst, but any kind of farming comes at the expense of the animal wellbeing. Money not spent on the animal is money earned: that is fundamentally broken and can’t result in good outcomes for the animal especially when they can’t express themselves the way we can.

There's a big assumption in using that proxy as a capacity to suffer.

I basically survive on grass finished beef. It's for my health, but it is also among the most ethical animal choices. They roam undeveloped wilderness (adjacent to my home) almost entirely uninterferred with until their last day, then are killed with little pain. I wouldn't make such a trade off over a life of more freedom and risk, but I know people who would and do.

> undeveloped wilderness

No, that is now pasture. Be truthful to yourself. Cattle ranching, particularly in "undeveloped wilderness" is incredibly destructive of the local environment.

Not saying GP does, but it's been so long since we cut all the trees down in Britain that people here think grass fields are undeveloped wilderness

I am a pro wildlife photographer and spend hours studying birds. And there is so little undeveloped wilderness left that it's just very sad. Even relatively wild places usually have some human influence.

I've traveled many tens of thousands of miles of gravel/dirt roads and 4wd trails all over the USA. There is essentially no place left in the lower 48 that is actually untouched. You can be 100 miles from the nearest paved road and still find trash and other impacts.

> Cattle ranching, particularly in "undeveloped wilderness" is incredibly destructive of the local environment.

This is the opposite of the truth. In fact cows are cultivating, manure spreading and seeding machines that vastly improve their future forage just by doing their thing, if not over grazed. I know a local rancher who makes all of his money as an elk hunting guide on his property. He keeps a herd of cattle for the purpose of improving the forage for the elk, and for his own table.

I invite you to come and hike on this land. I very much doubt that you would conclude that it has been damaged by the cows. In most places you could walk through a time warp to three hundred years ago and you couldn't tell the difference.

Cattle produce extreme amounts of methane, which is a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It might be ethical for the cows, but not for the climate unfortunately.

Cattle produce a normal amount of methane for ruminants, and we evolved to eat ruminants, following them around in their migrations, and eating grass indirectly through them. I was a vegan for years and my health deteriorated. I honestly believe that I would be dead now if I didn't change. I do not feel morally ambiguous about eating the food that I was evolved to eat, for the purpose of my own survival, and emitting the necessary quantity of greenhouse gasses in the process.

I'm not willing to live the smallest, least healthy life I can tolerate in order to make room for more people to do the same. A high population count does not strike me as a worthy goal, but a healthy and happy one does.

> a vegan for years and my health deteriorated

That’s unfortunate and I’m sorry to hear that.

For others reading, know that this is extremely rare. Most people on a vegan diet are healthy (you have to make sure you’re eating a balanced diet, and you don’t need nearly as much protein as you think you do). For iron (which can be lacking especially in women), cook on a cast iron or high carbon steel pan and it will transfer iron into your food that you’ll absorb.

I encourage people who are curious about it to watch « Game Changers » where top athletes (Lewis Hamilton, Schwarzenegger, others) talk about switching to a vegan diet and it’s effect on their health and performance. https://www.netflix.com/title/81157840

It's not so rare in my experience. I was deeply into the vegan scene in Santa Cruz CA with a crowd of quite committed people. Perhaps excessively so. Very clean, mostly raw diets. Several good friends dropped out for health issues like brain fog, cold sensitivity, heart palpitations. Others did quite well. I only know of one who is still vegan two decades later but there are probably others. And of course people who start down such a path are liable to have pre existing conditions. But it's sad to see the people that it isn't working for stay with it for too long out of a sense of shame or a need for community. I wish it were less a matter of identity.

Does this pan trick really gives you iron in a form you can assimilate and in a miningfull quantity?

Surprisingly, yes. My partner had iron deficiency problems and had to take iron pills (which are made from animal blood afaik and give bad stomach aches).

If you use the pan very regularly, the trace amounts are enough to add up to enough iron. She doesn’t have that problem anymore for years now.

It’s also the idea behind the lucky iron fish[0] to supplement the diet of people in Cambodia where anemia seems to be a problem.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_iron_fish

Same here bro/sis, eating only beef was transformative for autoimmune issues I had for years. There was simply no alternative that would give me a good quality of life, just heavy medication with awful side effects.

Wait, you eat only beef? Or beef as the only source of meat?

Only beef, it's a variant of the carnivore diet that excludes common autoimmune triggers, like eggs & dairy.

  > Only beef, it's a variant of the carnivore diet that excludes common autoimmune triggers, like eggs & dairy.

what about chicken, or fish? are those considered auto-immune triggers?

There is a lot of low quality chicken, both fish and chicken have very little fat. And their fatty acid profile is not ideal.

Won't that give you gout?

No, there are people following a leaner version of the diet who have no such issues. I eat moderate protein though (80-100g).

Same is true for vegetables too... many small animals are killed when preparing the earth (mice, snakes,...) then many more with pesticides and other chemicals.

Eating grass fed cows probably kills less animals per calorie than many vegetables.

I strongly doubt it. A cow goes through many years of meals in order for you to go through 1.

Eating meat is a personal choice but pretending it's somehow more morally virtuous than a salad is probably delusional

Same here. I stopped completely. I rarely eat meat but when I do, it's farmed chicken. Not great either, but at least it's a reduction and it doesn't have as much collateral damage (except land clearing).

Most of it isn't even good. I'll admit I'm not a good cook, but most fish just doesn't hit spots, and it's super expensive to boot.

Most fish in most US markets aren't worth buying, especially if you pay extra for "wild Alaskan cod" or whatever. Even a good cook will struggle with meat that deteriorated for a couple days in a holding tank, was frozen too slowly, re-thawed to market as "fresh", and frozen again when it didn't sell soon enough.

Farmed atlantic salmon, especially if it's pretty light colored, is the thing I've found that's most likely to be decent in various parts of the country without having to experiment with too many brands. The "belly" cut (with a thinner region where the ribs were) is best.

Luckily, salmon is one of the easier things for a home cook to get right. The higher fat content makes it more forgiving. Lightly salt it, throw it on a lightly oiled sheet pan, and bake at 200F till it's done (around 1hr depending on your oven, recipes usually recommend higher temperatures, but if it's overcooked it's less pleasant, and the lower temperature gives you more leeway as you're learning what that looks like in person -- watch a quick video while it cooks showing what "done" should be, but it's just as the fish starts flaking apart instead of sticking together, and the flakes shouldn't be very firm or dry yet).

Then make something to pair it with. Blacken some asparagus (peel any tough woody bits, especially if it's winter or the asparagus are big) or broccoli for a minute or two in a hot pan, sprinkle with a bit of salt, maybe squeeze in a lemon, and definitely melt a knob of butter over the veggies. Maybe sprinkle in a few pine nuts at that point to toast in the hot pan.

If you want to impress everyone, make a sauce to go with it. The simplest that comes to mind is to heat up some soy sauce, honey, garlic, and ginger together, cooking a minute or two till it's syrupy.

If you added lemon and pine nuts to the veggies, a lemon butter sauce might be appropriate instead. The basic idea is to cook the flavors down till there's not much liquid (e.g., sweating garlic in 1 lemon's worth of juice for 1-2 min), take the pan off the heat, and once it's not much more than room temperature you'll add in a few tablespoons of cold butter, one at a time, and whisk those in till they're melted. Butter is naturally a mixture of fat and water, and if you don't get it too hot it'll stay melted but still "mixed" (emulsified) and give you a thick, creamy sauce. Maybe watch a quick video on the idea first, but even if you "fail" you'll still get something that tastes good and is just thinner than you were attempting to make.

Good recipe, though I tend to use olive oil instead of/with butter.

Recirculating aquaculture systems on land might be a solution. But it's expensive and error prone, and the volumes are still very low.

Did you move to other alimentary disciplines too? Just curious

I’m definitely not a vegetarian by any stretch of the term, but I broadly restrict my meat eating to a couple of times a week, where it’s a small amount mostly for flavour, and mostly organic meat where available. I basically never eat meat if I’m ordering from a restaurant; every restaurant in my area at least has great vegetarian / vegan options available.

It’s also worth noting that the seafood aisle at the grocery store is essentially entirely the product of slave labor, at least at some point along the supply chain.

maybe if you're shopping at megafood inc., I know plenty of professional commercial fishermen and this is far from true, go to a fishmonger and ask him questions about where the fish comes from!

To that point, see the « outlaw ocean » book by Ian Urbina: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outlaw_Ocean

Even if you're not into saving the environment, the oceans are absolutely disgusting by this point and I wouldn't trust anything fished out of it.

> They mate for life.

Not really; see https://news.mit.edu/2022/divorce-albatross-shy-males-0913 and https://oceanconservancy.org/blog/2020/02/13/albatross-reall...

This particular albatross is on her 4th mate, so...for varying definitions of "life" i guess.

Life of either partner. They typically switch when the mate dies (understandably) or if the last attempt failed (no chick, chick died…)

> we destroy everything

With human birth rate declining maybe Nature will have a chance to heal ?

Birds' eggs are remarkable in of themselves but also for their importance to the food chain.

Birds have existed for a long time and we eat a lot of them.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poultry_farming

There is a moral difference between eating what you kill and just killing. The former is part of how life works and the latter is immoral and unjustified waste. If there is collateral damage, we are doing something wrong.

Doubly so because most species of albatross are at least threatened and nearly half are endangered. The ethics of poultry farming are dubious for many reasons, but there's no comparison to pushing entire species towards extinction.

> If there is collateral damage, we are doing something wrong.

There is extensive collateral damage, in extinctions, habitat loss, and industrial pollution at global scale.

For all the beauty on this planet, we very clearly are an abusive, cruel species.

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