Don’t be fooled by what comes to your mind at first sight!
The red liquid you see in the picture is not blood; Rather, it is milk. The red milk that is secreted from the flamingo layer and its red color is due to the red pigments of the algae that are the food of the flamingo.
Here, apparently, both parents intend to breastfeed at the same time, and when it arrives a moment later, it spills its blood-colored milk in the wrong place.
The reason is the strong desire of both parents to breastfeed under the influence of prolactin. Prolactin regulates both the secretion of milk and the mother’s seal, to the extent that the parent bird does not know how to feed its chicks.
In the common ancestry of today’s birds, of course, paternal seal has priority over maternal seal; If in ostriches, the father mostly sleeps on the egg, and in the fossils of dinosaurs that lay on the eggs, the histological studies of the cross-section of the long bones show that the parent that lays on the eggs was a male, like Chitipati, whose fossil was found in Mongolia in a position with its wings. It is widespread on the eggs.
But in many birds where sexual dimorphism is not seen, parental care and mating and evaluation of mutual competence are similar in both sexes, and the mates are lifelong.
Of course, not all birds breastfeed their chicks. The most famous lactating birds are pigeons, which feed their chicks with their thick, fatty and high-protein milk. Penguins and flamingos, like pigeons, give milk to their chicks, which is secreted from the wall of their scrotum.
But the pelican is also famous in Christian literature for feeding its chicks with its “blood” and because of this sacrifice, Christ was called nostra pelicana; A metaphor of a pelican that sacrifices its blood for its generation, and its roots go back to pre-Christian observations and stories.
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You might imagine that this story also comes from watching the feeding of the pelican chick from the red milk of its parents; The problem is that the pelican does not breastfeed its young, if it did, it would never have red milk like the flamingo. This is where a cultural-zoological hypothesis comes into play.
What can be seen in these old paintings is the name of pelican and the role of a chicken that gives its blood to some of its children. But the image of none of these birds is similar to the pelican! The Christian painters of the medieval centuries had not seen the pelican closely and had only heard its description. So they confused the description of the flamingo with the name of the pelican, and the metaphor of nostra pelicana was born.
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This post is written by monese_ghamgosar