Why do mother birds always deliberately leave out a few when feeding their babies? Scientists: the great wisdom of birds

It is said that watching animal videos is very healing, but the recent "bird mother feeding children" video makes people feel uncomfortable, because the video of each mother bird mouth with a lot of worms, enough for each child to eat 2-3, but the mother bird is a brain to feed all the worms to the same child, a few children even 1 are The mother bird fed all the worms to the same child.

Many people think it is the mother bird does not have the concept of mathematics, can not distinguish how many children they have and how much food they prepared, so do not know how to evenly distributed, so that foolishly fed all the food to the first few children.

But this is not the case, the scientists introduced that the birds are much smarter than we think, feeding the children inside actually contains great wisdom.

The great wisdom of birds

Malthus in his own book, "Population Theory", proposed how the number of individual organisms changes.

In this book, Malthus mentions two premises: food is necessary for living things to survive; reproduction between the sexes is necessary.

Based on these two premises, he points out that: under natural conditions, if there is enough food, then most of the offspring can survive, when the number of organisms will show a geometric increase, but the energy required by the organisms can only increase in arithmetic order.

When the number of creatures is too much, then there will be a shortage of energy and death, for example: when drought or drought and floods occur, humans will start a war and some other means to control the population.

The same is true for birds. When the external environment is suitable and there is enough food, then the mother bird can catch a large number of worms for each offspring to eat, so that each offspring can survive.

However, in the vast majority of cases, scarcity is always a normal part of life. When a mother bird catches bugs, she can only meet the energy needs of a small percentage of her offspring.

If the mother bird, like humans, distributes this food equally to each offspring, then it is possible that all of the offspring will starve, or even die.

But if the mother changes her strategy and gives priority to feeding one or two of her offspring, especially the larger, healthier ones, then although some will die, some of them will survive to adulthood so that the species does not become extinct.

In addition, there are some birds that breed only one offspring at a time, such as penguins. Most penguins have two eggs per litter, but they only choose the larger one to hatch, leaving the other one untouched.

Other penguins will hatch two eggs at the same time, but when the chicks are born, they feed their food to the larger penguin on a limited basis.

Mother penguins do all this to maximize the survival rate of one of them, rather than to pursue fairness and expose both offspring to a survival crisis.

In fact, the wisdom of birds does not stop there. Some chicks, shortly after birth, will squeeze other unhatched eggs out of the nest in order to have exclusive access to limited resources, thus increasing their survival rate.

Many people think that such birds have no morality, but in fact we have no right to judge them, because this is the wisdom of the birds to survive from generation to generation.

Why is this not the case for humans?

For humans, after giving birth to children to be responsible for each child, do not be partial to a particular one. The reason why humans think this way as well as do this is actually because of the emergence of agriculture.

Before the emergence of agriculture, humans and animals, the same way to store energy mainly by their own fat, when the winter when plant growth is slow, humans can get less energy from the outside world, then will rely on their own fat reserves. At this time, human resistance to risk is low, a natural disaster may lead to the death of many people. For example: droughts, floods, etc. can cause a large number of people to die from starvation.

However, after the emergence of agriculture, the ability of human beings to withstand risks began to become stronger, we can put the energy produced in the summer to use in the winter; as well as the rich years of food storage, to use the disaster year to eat.

Furthermore, the improvement of water facilities and the construction of reservoirs have ensured that mankind can continue to obtain a stable and reliable source of energy from nature, so that mankind can afford to raise each and every future generation.

Over time civilization and morality have developed in the human world, and these in turn require us to raise each and every offspring.

So, growing up in an affluent environment, we will always miss a few birds when we see their mothers feeding their young, and will feel that they are cruel, but in fact it is not the mothers who are cruel, but we do not live in the same environment as the birds.

Summing up

Not only birds, but also most of the offspring of other animals do not survive to adulthood. In order to survive, many organisms have retained survival wisdom about their species during the evolutionary process, among which the survival wisdom of birds is: sacrificing some of their offspring to ensure the survival of larger, healthier offspring.