Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of My Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing in on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. When the Nintendo hero Mario travels into the dream world of Subcan to battle the forces of wart, he encounters many strange creatures, including the mysterious
bird Oh. While there seems to be some long running debate regarding the creature's gender, there's no denying the reptilian's ability to shoot eggs at their enemies. First of all, it is interesting that bird Oh shoots eggs out of their mouth. We don't normally think of this as the place eggs might emerge from, but it's actually not without precedence in the natural world. The now extinct gastric brooding frog of Australia famously incubated young in the mother's stomach.
The female frog would swallow fertilized eggs or early stage larvae and brood them in her stomach, while the young would usually emerge from the mother's mouth gradually over the course of days. As Michael J. Tyler and David B. Carter reported in Animal Behavior back in one, restrained individuals
were also known to release young via quote propulsive vomiting. Similarly, the Natural World Harbor's numerous examples of mouth brooding, in which fertilized eggs are kept in one of the parents mouths and sometimes swapped back and forth to allow both parents to eat. Darwin's frog is noted for mouth brooding, as are numerous fish species, including those in the chick
lit family. But to actually eject eggs from your mouth as an offensive or defensive weapon, well, the notion of an agitated, gastric brooding frog certainly seems reasonably close to the idea, and while many creatures go to extreme links to protect eggs and young, the mathematics of parenting and survival don't always go in that direction. Consider the quaca
or short tailed scrub wallaby of Australia. As the Australian Nature Conservatory points out, this cat sized macropod gives birth just twenty seven days after mating, and it stores its joey in a pouch. Here it continues to develop for another six months. If threatened, however, she may expel the joey onto the ground, where the thrashing, squealing youngster can
serve as a distraction for a pursuing predator. While this may sound harsh, her survival is at stake, and she also has backups additional young suspended in the womb, which can be berthed shortly thereafter. It's not quite blasting egg projectiles at Italian plumbers, but it comes amazingly close in some respects. Perhaps Birdo employs a form of gastric brooding, and you've threatened, such as by Italian plumber dream Warriors, they simply projectile vomit some of their many many eggs
in their defense. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact each week. As always, you can email us at contact It's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.