If you have ever looked at how flamenco eats, you know how elegantly peculiar it is. Drink their heads inverted in the water and make a kind of Waddle cha-chas while they make their way through shallow waters, small crustaceans, insects, microscopic algae and other small aquatic chops.
Victor Ortega-Jiménez, an integrating biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, remembers being fascinated by this behavior the first time he saw it in 2019, duration of a trip with his wife and son to the Atlanta Zoo. Since then, he has really been asking what exactly, it was happening under the surface.
“The birds looked beautiful, but the big question for me was:” What is happening with the hydrodynamic mechanisms involved in the feeding of flamenco filters “?”
Back home, he was surprised by not finding any explanation in scientific literature, so he decided to produce oneself. Several years of meticulous research later, he and his colleagues reached a surprising discovery, described Monday in the minutes of the National Academy of Sciences. The flamenco, discovered, are active predators who take advantage of the physics of how water flows to sweep the dam and channels it directly in the mouth.
“We are challenging the idea that flamenco are only passive filter feeders,” said Dr. Ortega-Jiménez. “Just as spiders produce fabrics, flamingos produce vortices.”
The collaborators of Dr. Ortega-Jiménez included three exceptionally cooperative flamenco of the Nashville Zoo: Mattie, Marty and Cayenne. Zokeepers trained birds to feed on a transparent container, which allowed researchers to register what was happening using high -speed cameras and dynamic fluid methods. The scientists generated oxygen bubbles and added food parties to measure and visualize the flow of water as the birds fed. After the initial observations with live birds, the team built a three -dimensional model of a flamenco head and used it to explore more precision the biomechanics of the birds.
The flamingos, found, quickly and quickly portray their heads while feeding. Each of these movements creates a vortex similar to the tornado and an ascending current of the participations from the bottom to the surface of the water. Other observation and experiments with the mechanical peak revealed that the talk, in which the flamenco quickly applaud their peaks while their heads are raised but still underwater, is responsible for making the mini-seals flow directly towards the mouths of the birds, helping them to capture prey. Their bent peppers were also critical to generate vortices and recirculate swirls as they fed on the surface of the water, harvesting the rewards of those engineering flows.
Another “surprising finding,” said Dr. Ortega-Jiménez, was what the birds do with their feet, which the researchers explored using a mechanical flamenco foot and a computational modeling. The dance motion of their web -in -water appendices produced even more vortices that pushed additional participations towards the mouths that waited for birds while they were fed up in the water. Tasks together, these findings suggest that flamenco are “highly specialized and super food machines that use their entire body to feed,” said Dr. Ortega-Jiménez.
Sunghwan Jung, a biophysicist from Cornell University who did not participate in the study, praised work for being “an outstanding demonstration of how the biological form and movement can control the surrounding fluid to fulfill a functional role.”
Alejandro Rico Guuevara, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washton, Seattle, either involved at work, agreed that the new document repeats the notion that flamenco are passive in the way in which filter feed. “There are bone of many hypotheses around how their strange invoices could work,” he said, “but until recently we didn’t have the tools to study it.”
In addition to solving that mystery and revealing “a unique way of capturing small and evasive dams,” he continued, the investigation suggests another evolutionary reason for the feet of the Webbed in the birds, beyond just being good shovels.
Now that the curiosity of Dr. Ortega-Jiménez about the fluid dynamics of flamenco has been satisfied, he plans to focus his attention on what is happening within the feeding of the duration of the birds of the birds. Tasks together, such findings could lead to bioinseal technologies that capture things such as toxic or microplastic algae, he said.
“What is in the heart of filter feed in flamenco?” Hey said. “We are scientists because understanding these fascinating and mysterious birds as much as they interact with their fluid environment.”