Can man live on ostrich eggs alone?

Question

I am building a world inspired by Gondwana, the great southern mega-continent, filled with plants and creatures that live in or evolved first on the southern Continents of Earth. On this world, there are few large animals suitable for domestication, a few elephants and giant sloth, but much of the megafauna is birds and reptiles. I would like to have a nomadic culture roaming a semi-arid subtropical plain; imagine Argentina's Semiarid Pampas, the Levant or the Rio Grande valley.

The question of interest is how to support a reasonably high nomadic population without traditional domesticated animals, like cattle or sheep. My idea is to do this with a big vegetarian bird: an ostrich.

Ostriches

...mainly feed on seeds, shrubs, grass, fruit and flowers;

which should be a suitably vegetarian diet. I imagine the nomads could alter the environment through selective burning to favor nutritious foods that ostriches favor, like Acacia, Mesquite, or Prickly-pear Cactus.

The way nomads get the most out of their herds is to rely on their milk as a primary protein source, only killing the animals when necessary. Similarly, ostriches can provide a ready-made protein source: eggs. Homestead sites suggest you can get a chicken hen to lay 200 eggs per year on average. Livestrong suggests an ostrich egg is about 2000 calories per, so if you can get that number of eggs per year, you only need about two ostriches per person to keep your community going.

Is there any reason an egg-eating, ostrich raising nomadic society would not work?

Answer 1

First of all, an Ostrich hen can lay 40 – 60 eggs per year, averaging about 45-50 eggs per year. That’s the largest number I found and probably reflects domesticated farm-bred birds, which lay more. In this environment, they can all produce at this rate rather than the dominant female doing better, like in nature. This would be the case in your society as well.

The ostriches will be bred by them to be good laying hens, as separate breeds from those that are used primarily for meat or power.

That’s still a fraction of what you were hoping, but, as I indicated, you can plausibly push that by invoking selective breeding over generations.

As for nutrition, looking up the FDA label info for “egg” shows content but not percentage RDA. Scanning through the chart though one thing that sticks out is 0 for vitamin C. So humans cannot live off poultry eggs alone. You can compile the tables yourself if you can’t find an RDA chart for egg.

See what’s missing and figure out what else your nomads can add to their diet. You mentioned prickly pear cactus: the nomads should eat that themselves! The fruit is very good, but it’s not produced year-round.

Answer 2

As with most of single-food diets, the answer is no, of course not. You would have to find an egg that have the same % of human average daily intake requirement of everything, so you could have X eggs providing roughly 100% of daily needs.

An ostrich egg contains approximately 2000 calories, 47% protein and 45% fat. According to a study in 2003 in the British Poultry Science, ostrich eggs have a vitamin mark-up similar to that of chicken eggs. source

So, let's look at chicken egg:

• Riboflavin (B2) 42%
• Vitamin B12 46%
• Niacin (B3) 0% (0.064 mg)
• Vitamin K 0% (0.3 μg)

No matter how much eggs you will eat, you are not going to get near 100% of needed consumption with most of the vitamins. Either you have serious deficits, or you are overdosing other vitamins (and calories). Other nutrients, like protein - fat - carbohydrates trio, suffer similar disproportions.

TL;DR you can't live on a single food source unless you're a koala.

Answer 3

Yes, for a given value of only, but you will be better with more than one animal.

There are several living pastoralist groups where the bulk of their diet is made from a single source, they supplement it hunting, fishing, opportunistic gathering of other rarities and in some patch based horticulture. Yes the loss of milk is a big hit and eggs will not completely replace it. On the other hand eggs keep much better than milk does, weeks to months under the right conditions. The lack of milk means you need to make up for it in another fashion, say by increasing supplementation from other more hunting or fishing.

The laying pattern of ostriches could be completely changed by domestication and may not have been identical to modern african ostriches in any case. It's not as if the non-stop laying of chicken is natural. So getting eggs year round is not an issue. In fact you are more likely to have something like Rhea than ostriches in south america, and they lay more eggs and like a more leafy diet to boot, although the male egg protection may be a problem.

Additionally many nomads herd more than one animal. There other animals that could be domesticated, there are horses and llama/camelids that may be candidates. And with the wide range of Proboscidea some of those may be domesticable as well. Having both milk and eggs would put them on better footing tha many real world nomadic peoples.

there are also plenty of potential plant crops, from manioc to beans and squash.Some nomadic peoples do practice plant agriculture, they plant small patches and keep moving between them. This also means you are not stuck with only nomadic pastoralism.

Answer 4

I have a question. Are these nomads human or did they evolve on the planet with this creatures? If they are human then all bets are off. You cannot drop humans on a distant planet and expect them to survive in the native environment at all much less on one particular animal. We evolved to prey on and as predators of creatures on this planet. Finding a niche for us to live in another planet's evolution will pretty much get you panned in today's science fiction crowd but if you decide to make it fantasy then you don't have to worry about protein, calorie counts and so forth. On the other hand if you chose to make the nomads similar to humans but having evolved on the other planet your nomads can have evolved to prey on these animals before they domesticated them and the animals could believably fulfill most of their needs. Throw in a few native plants, roots and berries and you have enough of a varied diet to make a good story.

Answer 5

Egg with greens for vitamin C and you could live ok. But the man who invents bacon will be King!

Update:

To answer the question and satisfy the more pedantic, no.

The egg is the nearest thing to a complete food, but with out vitamin C, you will get scurvy. Other trace elements may be lacking. In New Zealamd, there used to be problems with people living inland suffering from iodine and selenium deficencies.