If you have ever really looked at how flamingos eat, you know how fascinating it is. They float their inverted heads in the water and do a kind of waggdle cha-cha while they make their way over shallow water, small shellfish, insects, microscopic algae and other small aquatic snacks.
Victor Ortega-Jiménez, an integrative biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, remembers that he was fascinated by this behavior the first time he saw it in 2019, during a trip with his wife and child to the Atlanta Zoo. Since then he wonders what exactly was going on below the surface.
“The birds looked beautiful, but the big question for me was:” What happens to the hydrodynamic mechanisms involved in the filter food of Flamingos? “He said.
At home he was surprised not to find an explanation in scientific literature – so he decided to produce one himself. A few years of meticulous research later, he and his colleagues came to a surprising discovery, described on Monday in the procedure of the National Academy of Sciences. Flamingos, they thought, his active predators Use the physics of how water flows To wipe prey and lead directly into their mouths.
“We challenge the idea that flamingos are just passive filter feeds,” said Dr. Ortega-Jiménez. “Just like spiders Webben produce, produce flamingos swirls.”
The employees of Dr. Ortega-Jiménez include three exceptional cooperative flamingos from the Nashville Zoo: Mattie, Marty and Cayenne. Zookeepers have trained the birds to feed in a clear container, so that the researchers could record what happened using high-speed cameras and liquid dynamic methods. The scientists generated oxygen bubbles and added food particles to measure and visualize the flow of the water as fed the birds. After first observations with the living birds, the team built a 3D model of a flamingo head and used it to more accurately explore the biomechanics of the birds.
Flamingos, they found their heads often and quickly and feed them. Each of those movements creates a tornado-like vortex and a whim of particles from the bottom to the water surface. Further observation and experiments with the mechanical beak revealed that chattering, in which flamingos quickly clap their beaks while their heads are lifted but still under water, is responsible for causing the mini-controllers who flow directly to the mouth of the birds and helps them to catch prey. Their curved, L-shaped beaks were also crucial for generating swirls and recirculating vertebrae while feeding on the surface of the water and the benefits of those manipulated flows.
Another ‘amazing finding,’ said Dr. Ortega-Jiménez, was what the birds do with their feet, who investigated the researchers using a mechanical flamingo foot and computational modeling. The dance -like movement of their flippers under water produced even more swirls that pushed extra particles in the direction of the waiting mouths of the birds while they fell upside down in the water. All in all, these findings suggest that flamingos’ highly specialized, super food machines that use their entire body to feed, “Dr. Ortega-Jiménez.
Sunghwan Jung, a biophysicist at Cornell University who was not involved in the study, praised the work because he was ‘an excellent demonstration of how organic form and movement can arrange the surrounding liquid to play a functional role’.
Alejandro Rico Guuevara, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, also not involved in the work, agreed that the new newspaper determines the idea that Flamingos are passive in the way they feed. “There have been many hypotheses to how their strange bills could work,” he said, “but until recently we did not have the tools to study it.”
In addition to resolving that mystery and revealing ‘a uniquely developed way to catch small and evasive prey’, he continued, the research suggested another evolutionary reason for flippers in birds, be further than just good paddles.
Now the curiosity of Dr. Ortega-Jiménez after flamingo-illed liquid dynamics is satisfied, he plans to focus his attention on what happens in the beaks of the birds during feeding. In summary, such findings can ultimately lead to bio -inspired technologies that record things such as toxic algae or microplastics, he said.
“What is the core of filter food in flamingos?” he said. “We as scientists want to understand both the form and the function of these fascinating and mysterious birds while interacting with their smooth environment.”
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