The situation isn’t all that different for birds, which start flexing their muscles just a few days after their egg is laid.
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Human pregnancy is a prime example: Fetuses spend months executing a mix of twitches, stretches, and kicks that are thought to be an in utero trial run for the motions “they need to survive after birth,” Niamh Nowlan, a developmental-biomechanics expert at University College Dublin, told me. The notion that embryos can wriggle around in the womb or egg isn’t new. By the time these birds hatch, their foster siblings already don’t stand a chance. “It’s a home gym in the egg,” Mark Hauber, a biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who collaborated with McClelland on the study, told me. In a new study, they describe how the animals exercise as embryos while they’re still incubating in the egg, a sort of prenatal CrossFit that preps them for the slaughterous rampage that follows. “It’s just crazy.”īy peeping on cuckoo chicks during development, McClelland and her colleagues have homed in on one of the major strategies these birds, and several others like them, use to achieve their super-swole status at such a young age. “It’s like a newborn baby lifting a bowling ball,” Stephanie McClelland, a biologist at the Royal Holloway University of London, told me. Fresh out of their shells, the birds are jacked, capable of hoisting hefty eggs or chicks-including some that weigh about as much as they do-onto their back before throwing them out like trash. The acts are ruthless, but also remarkable physical feats. The more of their foster siblings they kill in cold blood, the more food and attention they can con out of their adoptive parents. The cuckoos are parasites, strategically placed by their mother into the abode of another species so they can mooch their way through adolescence. Technically, the evictions they carry out are from living quarters that aren’t even their own. Within a day or two of hatching, the infant birds-still blind, pink, and featherless-will start to evict the other residents of their nest, hurling them over the edge and to their death.
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