8/31/2023 0 Comments Flamingo one foot![]() How was this happening? We turned to anatomical reports and skeletons of flamingos to see if we could find evidence of biomechanical stabilizing mechanisms that help flamingos easily stand on one leg. Chang and Ting, Biology Letters, CC BY-ND There was very little displacement while the bird had its eyes closed, a bit more while alert and still, and even more while alert and moving. We set out to find whether flamingos relied mostly on passive biomechanics or active nervous system interventions to stand on one leg.Ī visualization of the center of pressure (CoP) displacement and velocity underneath a flamingo’s foot as it stood on the force plate. Hanging bats and perching birds have evolved passive mechanisms for grasping that allow them to sleep without fear of losing their grip. Other animals, such as horses, have evolved passive stabilizing mechanisms to allow them to sleep while standing. Many animals have evolved ways of moving that minimize the amount of energy they expend, whether it’s the pendular mechanics of penguins waddling and gibbons swinging through the trees or the bouncing mechanics of cockroaches. Flamingo legs (like other birds) are constantly in a state of “bent knees,” so there is the potential for large muscular energy expenditure, or muscular effort, necessary to support their body weight. Imagine holding a squat posture with your thigh horizontal and your knee at a right angle – you’d quickly feel the burn. When you stand in line at the grocery store, you don’t stand with your knees bent – that would require you to expend a huge amount of energy to activate your leg muscles. And if it was fatiguing for flamingos to stand on one leg, why would they switch between one leg and the other instead of standing on two legs? If there were an added energetic cost for standing on one leg, it would not make much sense for flamingos to save on thermal energy loss only to lose on muscular energy expenditure. This theory is based on the idea that standing on two legs is more fatiguing than standing alternately on one leg and then the other, but no one has ever directly tested that.Ī large proportion of the metabolic energy any animal expends is due to activating muscles as they stand up against gravity and control movement. Standing on one leg would presumably cut the energy lost to heat in half.Īnother hypothesis is that standing on one leg reduces muscle fatigue by giving one leg a rest while the other supports the body. Some people thought it was to conserve body heat lost by standing in cold water. The specimen’s body wasn’t as stable on two legs, the researchers found.The bulk of a flamingo’s mass sits half a meter above the ground, on a single, slender leg. The flamingo’s center of gravity was close to the inner knee where bones started to form the long column to the ground, giving the precarious-looking position remarkable stability. The bird’s distribution of weight, however, looked important for one-footed balance. The bones themselves don’t seem to have a strict on-off locking mechanism, though Ting has observed bony crests, double sockets and other features that could facilitate stable standing. What bends in the middle of the long flamingo leg is not a knee but an ankle (which explains why to human eyes a walking flamingo’s leg joint bends the wrong way). In flamingo anatomy, the hip and the knee lie well up inside the body. All of a sudden, the bird specimen settled naturally into one-legged lollipop alignment. “The ‘ah-ha!’ moment was when I said, ‘Wait, let’s look at it in a vertical position,’” Ting remembers. Deceased Caribbean flamingos a zoo donated to science gave a better view. Museum bones revealed features of the skeleton that might enhance stability, but bones alone didn’t tell the researchers enough. When a bird tucked its head onto its pillowy back and shut its eyes, the center of pressure made smaller adjustments (within a radius of 3.2 millimeters on average, compared with 5.1 millimeters when active). ![]() “Patience,” Ting says, was the key to any success in this experiment.Īs a flamingo standing on one foot shifted to preen a feather or joust with a neighbor, the instrument tracked wobbles in the foot’s center of pressure, the spot where the bird’s weight focused. Keepers at Zoo Atlanta hand-rearing the test subjects let researchers visit after feeding time in hopes of catching youngsters inclined toward a nap - on one leg on a machine. Ting and Young-Hui Chang of the Georgia Institute of Technology tested balance in fluffy young Chilean flamingos coaxed onto a platform attached to an instrument that measures how much they sway. ![]() A flamingo’s hip and knee lie inside the bird’s body. Translate that improbably long flamingo leg into human terms, and the visible part of the leg would be just the shin down. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. ![]()
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