neutrino_cannon
Master Poster
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2002
- Messages
- 2,574
You read that right; there are in fact animals that feed their young with bodily secretions that are not mammals. Some folks are real persnickety and won't call something "milk" unless it came from a mammal, but that's just prejudice.
For some strange reason, Middle Age scholars believed that the pelican would feed its young with its own blood. I have no idea where they got such a preposterous notion, but then these were the same people who believed that barnacles turn into geese and that the best procedure to cure a sword wound was to boil a complicated potion out of bear-skull scrapings under a full moon and apply said goop to the sword.
But it turns out that some birds do feed their young with their bodies. Pigeons and flamingos produce a milky substance in their crops, which they regurgitate to their young. It's somewhat higher in fat and minerals than mammalian milk; the minerals in particular being very important to the development of young birds. Many domestic birds develop osteological problems due to lack of minerals, and I suspect that calcium requirements during development are the reason that birds have never evolved live birth.
Somewhat less well known is the fact that emperor penguins also produce milk, although this seems to be a less routine occurrence than in pigeons or flamingos.
But surely this pales compared to the occurrence of milk in tsetse flies .
"The tsetse fly's unique viviparous reproductive biology (females use milk gland secretions to nourish three larval instars)"
My mind is officially blown.
For some strange reason, Middle Age scholars believed that the pelican would feed its young with its own blood. I have no idea where they got such a preposterous notion, but then these were the same people who believed that barnacles turn into geese and that the best procedure to cure a sword wound was to boil a complicated potion out of bear-skull scrapings under a full moon and apply said goop to the sword.
But it turns out that some birds do feed their young with their bodies. Pigeons and flamingos produce a milky substance in their crops, which they regurgitate to their young. It's somewhat higher in fat and minerals than mammalian milk; the minerals in particular being very important to the development of young birds. Many domestic birds develop osteological problems due to lack of minerals, and I suspect that calcium requirements during development are the reason that birds have never evolved live birth.
Somewhat less well known is the fact that emperor penguins also produce milk, although this seems to be a less routine occurrence than in pigeons or flamingos.
But surely this pales compared to the occurrence of milk in tsetse flies .
"The tsetse fly's unique viviparous reproductive biology (females use milk gland secretions to nourish three larval instars)"
My mind is officially blown.
