Small wonder, then, that the amount of milk the denning mother produced exceeded the weight she lost. But she is consuming all the excreta of her young, which she then puts back in her milk.” There was only one way the water isotopes could have ended up in mother’s milk. The researchers were startled to detect in the mother bear’s blood and milk traces of the distinctively labeled water samples they’d earlier given to the cubs as part of the experiment. Olav Oftedal, now an emeritus researcher at the Smithsonian Institution, and his colleagues sought to estimate milk consumption rates among black bear cubs as they nursed in a den. Power said, “because a lot of that protein is a calcium-phosphorus delivery device.” “If I’m going to have a high-calcium, high-phosphorus milk, I have to have a high-protein milk,” Dr. If you simply dropped large quantities of calcium and phosphorus into most types of mammalian milk, the minerals would glom together into insoluble phosphate compounds. “So there’s going to be a lot of calcium and phosphorus going into this baby.”īut why all the protein? The researchers soon realized it was a matter of chemistry. “What does an armadillo build? A bony shell,” Dr. Transfixing Beauty: Each spring and fall, the skies in Denmark come to life with the swirling displays of European starlings.They could be adapting to environmental changes. Avian Vagrants : Birds traveling outside their native range might not have lost their way.But a parrot that walks on three limbs defies the expectations. Confounding Creature: Nature seems to have a strong preference for bilateral bodies.Ancient Swans: Paleontologists were able to reconstruct what a flightless bird that prowled the seas of Japan millions of years ago looked like.
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