Our curator of birds, Dr. Juan Cornejo, has been looking into the natural parameters of kiwi egg incubation for the past few years, to better understand their biology and how conservationists could care for eggs at earlier stages in their life cycle.
Conservation organisations around the motu, with approval from the Department of Conservation, artificially incubate and hatch kiwi eggs to eventually release them on to predator free islands and ensure the species survival. The science behind how kiwi eggs are incubated are drawn from two previous studies in 1978 and 2002, but there are still many unknowns when it comes to incubating young eggs.
The aim of this intensive research project is to understand how kiwi eggs might be incubated at earlier stages, as currently eggs that are less than 11 days old have had only an 8% chance of hatching success when artificially incubated. If eggs could be incubated earlier, it would mean an increase in the amount of eggs that could be hatched per season – affectively improving kiwi conservation efforts.
To harvest this data, Juan has developed a 3D-printed egg that can be placed under incubating male kiwi and gather important information such as the temperature gradient across the egg, the humidity around the egg, and how often and at what angles the egg is turned. To validate the data previously obtained from kiwi at the Zoo, this year we’ve started to place these ‘smart eggs’ underneath wild kiwi, working alongside Dr. Isabel Castro from Massey University and Dr. Stephen Marsland from Victoria University of Wellington.
