Ostrich egg
egg from ostrich
The egg of the ostrich (genus Struthio) is the largest of any living bird (being exceeded in size by those of the extinct elephant bird genus Aepyornis and some moa such as the genus Dinornis). The shell has a long history of use by humans as a container and for decorative artwork, including beads. The eggs are edible but not commonly eaten.
Biology
The female common ostrich lays her fertilized eggs in a single communal nest, a simple pit, 30 to 60 cm (12–24 in) deep and 3 m (9.8 ft) wide, scraped in the ground by the male. The dominant female lays her eggs first, and when it is time to cover them for incubation she discards extra eggs from the weaker females, leaving about 20 in most cases. A female common ostrich can distinguish her own eggs from the others in a communal nest. Ostrich eggs are the largest of all eggs, though they are actually the smallest eggs relative to the size of the adult bird — on average they are 15 cm (5.9 in) long, 13 cm (5.1 in) wide, and weigh 1.4 kilograms (3.1 lb), over 20 times the weight of a chicken's egg and only 1 to 4% the size of the female. They are glossy cream-colored, with thick shells marked by small pits.
The eggs are incubated by the females by day and by the males by night. This uses the coloration of the two sexes to escape detection of the nest, as the drab female blends in with the sand, while the black male is nearly undetectable in the night.
“Ostrich egg” enters the record as egg from ostrich. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ostrich and ostrich can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ostrich egg” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.