Flamantos are filter feeders who live shrimps, algae and other amuses-toilets in wetlands around the world.
Serhat Cetinkaya / Anadolu via Getty Images
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Serhat Cetinkaya / Anadolu via Getty Images
The flamingos look graceful, but when it is time to eat, they are very silly.
“All their food behavior is so bizarre,” said Steven Whitfield, director of land conservation and wetlands at Audubon Nature Institute in New Orleans,.
The tagged birds feed on shrimp and algae in the Save swamps and marshes around the world. To take a bite, they knock their heads underwater and open their bills quickly, as if they were chatting. Then, they trample with the feet and wave in the mud, swing their heads up and down as you go.
It is not immediately easy why the emblematic pink birds would adopt this absurd approach to have a meal. These are filter feeders, “so they are a bit like the bird version of an oyster,” said Whitfield. They filter water through their L -shaped beaks, trapping shrimps, seaweed, seeds and all that they find tasty.
But with their heads practically between their legs, their bills seem to be upside down and in the face of the wrong way to pick up the shrimp and the seaweed in front of them.
“Flamantos are doing everything bad, it seems that”, explains Saad Bhamla, biophysicist at Georgia Tech University who studies how animals use physics to solve problems. The Bhamla student, Victor Ortega-Jiménez, first noticed the strange food behavior during a day for the Atlanta Zoo laboratory a few years ago. Ortega-Jiménez wanted to know what was going on.
“All we need is a hook, an observation, and off you go for the races,” explains Bhamla.
Of course, the flamingos know perfectly what they are doing, and now Bhamla’s group. To write This week’s number newspaper Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesThe team reveals that the entire Flamant’s diet process is actually a tour de force in fluid dynamics.
The bird creates swirls in water with almost all movements. Take, for example, the scanning of his head. The shape of her bill creates a tiny tornado while she leaves the water. The whirlwind arouses prey and the trap long enough for the bird to reproduce and pick it up. The same goes for chatter, which pulls food to its beak.
Then there is the strange trampling of their feet. The study reveals that the palmate toes of Flamingos create a pair of whirlpools that push food to their invoices. This is why it is logical to have your head in front of the feet instead of everything that is in front of them.
“What they are mainly doing is playing with fluid dynamics – using the beak, using their legs, using their heads and necks,” said Bhamla.
In the end, says Bhamla, the Flamingo may have a little more to teach humans. He works with chemists who, among others, want to learn to better filter water through the membranes. These membranes frequently obstruct debris of size similar to what flamingos decrease for their food. It therefore seems possible that some of the techniques inducing the vortex of Flamantos can be adapted to help keep the filters clear.
Now, “we mainly use intelligent tips inspired by flamations” to try to find solutions, he said.
Whitfield, who was not affiliated with the work, says that it shows the great thing about science – there are always mysteries waiting to be resolved.
“And with birds as bizarre as flamingos,” he adds, “there is probably more than average”.