Eggstremely Interesting!

I guess you take us eggs rather for granted – I’ll bet you have a box of us in your refrigerator right now – maybe from a hen or even a duck – but there’s more to us eggs than just omelettes you know (and that’s no eggaggeration!!!)

First there’s our shape – OK I’m not one of those skinny minnies, I’m well-rounded, even oval, you might say, but I’m not the only shape of egg – no, we eggs come in various guises: as well as oval, there are round ones, pear-shaped ones and even flat sphere-shaped ones – whatever our shape though, we certainly know how to embrace our curves!

So why all the different shapes? Well sometimes it comes in handy to be adapted to your particular nest location – so for example, seabirds like to lay us on cliff ledges for safety – but the only problem with that is that if we were round, we would be doing a ‘Thelma and Louise’ all the time; so those of us that belong to seabirds are pointed at one end and rounded at the other and this helps us to avoid deep dives!

But it’s not just location, location, location that affects our shape – it’s actually all down to mama. If she’s a serious flyer, living her life on the wing, then she will produce a streamlined version of us, so that when we’re forming inside her, we don’t slow her down any. If mum is a more stay at home type of fowl, then she’s more likely to make us round shaped, as she doesn’t need to worry so much about her figure.

Now you might think that we eggs are fragile and delicate – and it’s true, if you go dropping us, then things are likely to get messy; but we’re actually a lot stronger than you give us credit for: take a typical hen’s egg – it can withstand 100lbs of compression – that’s a lot of pressure! How do we do that?… well, that would be telling, we all need our little secrets…

If you’re wondering what our shells are made of, mainly we’re covered in clever calcium carbonate; it might look solid, but it contains tiny pores (up to 7,000!) that allow air in and carbon dioxide out, so we’re sure of a breath of fresh air!

We eggs know a thing or two about dress sense – we come in a whole host of colours – whites, blues, greens, browns, reds and even pinks – we do the full range – and if you don’t like plain, no problem, we do patterns aplenty: speckles, dapples, spots and hues. This gives us a cunning camouflage to put off pesky ovivores, as well as making us look really pretty of course.

We aren’t anything new – we’ve been around for over 300 million years! As reproduction goes, we’re a popular choice – birds, reptiles, turtles and insects lay us – in fact even some of you mammals have opted for us too (but then again the duck billed platypus always did seem a bit of a confused critter!!)

We always get asked what is the biggest egg in the world? I’m sure you’ll all know it’s the ostrich egg – and whilst 15 cm / 6 inches might seem large to you, it’s not such a big deal for the ostrich as it’s only about 2% of the size of mom. No, if you ask me, the biggest egg to remember is the poor kiwi’s; because it’s a quarter the size of mum – so it’s something she’s unlikely to forget in a hurry! That’s gotta hurt!

What’s the tiniest egg? That’s another favourite question – it belongs to the little humming bird and it’s only ½ cm (just over ¼ inch). If you want to count flies, then the clemelis pullata fly’s eggs are microscopic at 0.02 mm (0.0007 in).

It seems that you humans are true egg lovers – you enjoy dressing us up with lots of colours and designs and celebrate us as the symbol of new life – I hear that you even make your own version of us in chocolate! Well, each to their own…