![]() The term filter feeder may conjure images of baleen whales or oyster reefs, but flamingos are filter feeders too. Flamingos are filter feeders and turn their heads “upside down” to eat. As a flamingo dines on algae and brine shrimp, its body metabolizes the pigments - turning its feathers pink. They are also found in the microscopic algae that brine shrimp eat. Carotenoids give carrots their orange color or turn ripe tomatoes red. Many plants produce natural red, yellow or orange pigments, called carotenoids. Flamingos get their pink color from their food.įlamingos really are what they eat. Suhana Khan gives Rs 1000 to woman asking for money netizens hail Shah Rukh Khan, Gauri Khan’s upbringing.2.‘I got to know myself better, take decisions for my own body’. ![]() ![]() Konkona Sen Sharma’s mother Aparna Sen never allowed her to watch Ramayan and Mahabharat on TV: ‘She insisted that…’.5 killed in Uttarakhand’s Rudraprayag as car gets buried under landslide bodies recovered.4 in recent Session, 2 over 2 days: A look at suspension of MPs in current Parliament.‘My journey as an entrepreneur gave me wings’.Gauri Lankesh murder trial: Prosecution witness turns hostile, another identifies 3 key accused.A half screen on the front makes Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5 double the fun to use.After joining Bayern Munich, Harry Kane leaves behind a lasting legacy and a huge hole in Tottenham’s frontline.‘News about my social media earnings is not true’: Virat Kohli breaks silence on his per post earnings on Instagram.6 tips for cutting costs on back-to-school shopping.Caught in the Manipur crossfire: A look at the Meitei Pangals.The experiment with the dead birds, however, showed that they could stand on one leg with no muscular effort and that the body support mechanism is passive. One is that it is to reduce muscle fatigue (which would necessitate alternating from one foot to the other). The paper mentions two hypotheses about why flamingos stand on one leg. Flamingos are apparently able to do it with relatively little effort.” “If a human were to adopt this posture, it would require great muscular effort from our thigh muscles. This is common in birds… and one of the main reasons we were curious about how flamingos could stand for so long with ‘bent knees’,” Chang told The Indian Express by email. “The upper leg, or thigh, is oriented horizontally and adjacent to the main body of the flamingo. In many birds, including flamingos, the knee is well inside the body while the joint that is visible - and bends backwards - is the ankle. What had drawn them to the research was largely the anatomy of flamingos. (Source: adapted from research paper by T Ling and Y-H Chang in Biology Letters) The sway was minimal, with the centre of pressure directly under the tarsometatarsophalangeal (TMP) joint. Limb position in a sleeping flamingo the hip is horizontal and the knee inside the body. “… As we did not observe large postural sway when standing on one leg, there may also be passive mechanisms for balance, which may be particularly important during sleep,” Ting and Chang write in their paper. They found the sway several times more pronounced in birds that were active than in those that were quiescent. The researchers put active as well as quiescent flamingos (eyes closed) on a force plate and tracked their body movements. The birds appear to only be able to use this mechanism when they are standing on one leg.” Passive mechanisms for balance suggested themselves again during the experiments with live birds, which compared how much a flamingo’s body sways when awake and when asleep. “One way to think about it,” Chang added, “is that there is a mechanism for standing on one leg passively, which would require very little muscle effort. “We showed that that the joints folded down into a compact and stable configuration if the leg was held at an angle similar to one-legged standing, but that the joints were not stable when the leg was held in a two-legged pose,” Ting told The Indian Express. They set up a cadaver in both one-legged and two-legged stances, and found that it was stable only when one foot was directly beneath the body, as in one-legged standing. ![]() In a study published in Biology Letters, biomedical engineer Lena Ting and neuromachinist Young-Hui Chang of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, describe experiments they conducted on juvenile Chilean flamingos as well as cadavers. New research suggests that a flamingo is more stable and requires less muscle effort when standing on one leg than when standing on two - whether awake, asleep, or even dead. Standing on one leg provides more stability, requires less muscular effort, research has found.įor those who wonder at the sight of a flamingo standing on one leg, the right question to ask may not be how, but why. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |