I once lived in an apartment in Colorado with a balcony overlooking a pond. Once a grebe was paddling around in it followed by four chicks. It was a great image for the Colorado Tourism Office. Then mamma grebe swam back and swallowed the fourth chick whole, and the smaller family paddled away.
Brood reduction isn't common in grebes, but I saw it anyway, and thought maybe I didn't get the straight dope from Disney movies growing up.
> In these three booby species, hatching order indicates chick hierarchy in the nest. The A-chick is dominant to the B-chick, which in turn is dominant to the C chick, etc. (when there are more than two chicks per brood). Masked booby and Nazca booby dominant A-chicks always begin pecking their younger sibling(s) as soon as they hatch; moreover, assuming it is healthy, the A-chick usually pecks its younger sibling to death or pushes it out of the nest scrape within the first two days that the junior chick is alive. Blue-footed booby A-chicks also express their dominance by pecking their younger sibling. However, unlike the obligately siblicidal masked and Nazca booby chicks, their behavior is not always lethal. A study by Lougheed and Anderson (1999) reveals that blue-footed booby senior chicks only kill their siblings in times of food shortage.
When I was in college I worked in a lab where part of my job was killing rats (I actually had a real moral problem that the general term used for the killing of lab animals at this time was "sacrificing", e.g. "I sac'ed that litter of rats yesterday", because it felt like a way to lessen ones natural emotional guilt at the task. Not sure if that term is still used today.) I really had a moral quandary in what I did, even moreso because I felt a visceral disgust (like I actually threw up a bit) the first time I had to kill a rat and then cut off its head with a pair of scissors, but after I got used to it I had no problem with it - I came to understand how people can get used to doing things they originally found morally reprehensible, and it scared me about myself.
Anyway, I always found my guilt was assuaged at least a little bit if a mama rat would eat one of the babies by herself. "Hey, I'm no worse than the mom!" I'd say to myself. Then I felt a lot worse when I came to understand that moms tend to eat their babies when under high stress or when they think a baby is sick, which was probably a result of living in the lab in the first place.
Thank you for sharing your story. I also experienced something similar having to kill mice we caught on glue trips before I knew of how painful they can be for the mice. I heard being scared about yourself and realizing the potential you have for darkness within you, is a natural step in healthy human development. (Not that everyone has to kill or actually do something dark or unethical to realize that, there are certainly other ways).
Then when I dug into some rabbit holes to better understand the potential for humans to execute on this darkness or sinful behavior both historically and currently, it opened me up to a sudden realization where I could no longer see or experience the darkness in the world with the gullibility and naiveness I had as a child - this means surely someone died in an area like the public mall where I am at, or in this alley over the centuries, or even this may happen later today and I was just there - it could even involve my own death if I should be unlucky. (or self defense, and someone else's).
Do you ever wish you could go back to a state of ignorance about "sacrifices" and death in the sense of what those experiences opened up for you?
Yes, the term is “sacrificed” is unfortunately used today in many research labs in the US.
My advisor had a *strict* policy against people using that terminology in the lab and in his department.
“We sometimes euthanize or kill animals in a part of the difficult process of research. We do not sacrifice them - we are not making offerings to some deity. We are conducting research, not participating in a religion.”
“Sacrifice” is a euphemism that serves only to disconnect the ethical and emotional burden of killing animals for research [0].
And I deeply sympathize with your ethical and emotional guilt. The research I did in my PhD contributed to the foundational knowledge in my field, but not without severe and serious tolls. The way people become normalized to euthanasia in research environments is scary.
I worked with a guy who had an internship studying the effects of some drug on rats. He said he didn't have much of a problem killing the rats but also claimed that he knew his dog realized what he was up to at work.
It made me think he might have had more of a problem with it then he thought.
Brood reduction isn't common in grebes, but I saw it anyway, and thought maybe I didn't get the straight dope from Disney movies growing up.