If you’ve really looked at how the flamingos ate, you know how captivating it is. They jostle their inverted heads in the water and make a kind of cha-cha of Waddle while they cross the shallow waters, the small crustaceans, the small crustaceans, the microscopic algae and other tiny aquatic pieces.
Victor Ortega-Jiménez, an integrative biologist at the University of California in Berkeley, remembers having been fascinated by this behavior the first time he saw him in 2019, during a trip with his wife and child at the Atlanta zoo. Since then, he wonders what was going on exactly under the surface.
“The birds were beautiful, but the big question for me was:” What happens with the hydrodynamic mechanisms involved in the supply of the flamingos? “” He said.
Back home, he was surprised not to find any explanation in scientific literature – so he decided to produce one himself. Several years of meticulous research later, he and his colleagues arrived at a surprising discovery, described Monday in the acts of the National Academy of Sciences. The Flemmentsos, they found, are active predators that exploit physics in the way water flows To sweep the prey and enter it directly into their mouths.
“We dispute the idea that the flamingos are just passive filter feeders,” said Dr. Ortega-Jiménez. “Just as spiders produce canvases, Flemso-Forms produce whirlwinds.”
Dr. Ortega-Jiménez employees included three exceptionally cooperative flamingos of the Nashville Zoo: Mattie, Marty and Cayenne. Zoo guards trained birds to feed in a clear container, which allowed researchers to record what was going on using high -speed cameras and fluid dynamic methods. Scientists have generated oxygen bubbles and added food particles to measure and view the flow of water as the birds fed. After the first observations with living birds, the team built a 3D model of a flamingo head and used it to explore the biomechanics of birds more precisely.
The Flemings, they found, frequently and quickly withdraw their heads as they feed. Each of these movements creates a tornado type vortex and an increase in bottom particles towards the surface of the water. An additional observation and experiences with the mechanical beak revealed that the chatter, in which the flamingos quickly applaud their spins while their heads are lifted but always underwater, is responsible for the circulation of mini-owners directly towards the mouth of birds, by helping them to capture the prey. Their beaks in the shape of L were also essential to generate whirlpools and recirculation the whirlpools when they fed on the surface of the water, collecting the rewards of these modified flows.
Another “incredible discovery”, said Dr. Ortega-Jiménez, was what birds make of their feet, which the researchers explored using a mechanical flamingo foot and computer modeling. The dance movement of their webbed appendages underwater produced even more whirlwinds which pushed additional particles to the waiting mouths of the birds as they fed on water. Together, these results suggest that the flamingos are “very specialized and super food machines that use their entire body for food,” said Dr. Ortega-Jiménez.
Sunghwan Jung, biophysicist at Cornell University which was not involved in the study, praised the work to be “an exceptional demonstration of the way in which biological form and movement can control the surrounding fluid to play a functional role”.
Alejandro Rico-Guevara, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, also not involved in the work, has agreed that the new document puts in place that the flamingos are passive in the way they filter food. “There have been many hypotheses surrounding how their strange bills could work,” he said, “but until recently, we did not have the tools to study it.”
In addition to solving this mystery and revealing “an evolved way uniquely to capture tiny and elusive prey,” he continued, research suggests another evolutionary reason for webbed feet in birds, beyond the simple good Pigie.
Now that the curiosity of Dr. Ortega-Jiménez about the dynamics of fluids inspired by the flamingo has been satisfied, he plans to turn his attention to what is happening inside the birds of birds during food. Overall, such discoveries could possibly lead to bio-inspired technologies that capture things like toxic algae or microplastics, he said.
“What is at the heart of the filters’ diet in the Flamingo?” He said. “As scientists, we want to understand both the form and function of these fascinating and mysterious birds when they interact with their fluid environment.”