The least studied penguins in the world lay two eggs each breeding season, only to abandon the first one.
simply rolls away. But sometimes, the female will purposefully ditch their first born, going so far as to push it out of the nest.
Since the first egg the penguins lay is much smaller than the second, the mothers choose to keep the latter. Although there are a few theories, the researchers behind this new study suspect the earlier egg is smaller because it is formed while the birds are still migrating to their breeding islands off the southern coast of New Zealand. The second one is laid about five days after the first.
With more food available to the mother penguin, 'egg B' has features that give it an inherent advantage over the earlier-laid 'egg A'. It is larger, and these penguins tend to put the larger one at the back of the brood patch when they are incubating their eggs. More than 90 percent of the time, the eggs were just laid directly onto the ground; only sometimes were they squeezed onto a mat of straw-like dried grass.To do this, the team placed a ring of stones around 14 'nests' to stop the A-eggs from rolling away, as they usually seem to do, especially when B-eggs are added to the mix.
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