10/26/2023 0 Comments Flamingo one foot![]() (Overall though, the majority of the flock favored standing on one leg.) They found that when it was warmer, more birds would stand on two feet, while in cooler weather, more favored the one-legged stance. To put the idea of thermoregulation to the test, the team noted the temperature and weather conditions when the flamingos were resting. If the theory was correct, the birds should take their first steps faster coming from the unipedal position, but Anderson found that the birds were faster off the block when they had been standing on both legs, ruling out that theory. To evaluate the muscle fatigue theory, the researchers watched the flamingos and timed how long it took for them to start moving from both unipedal and bipedal resiting positions. To test these ideas, Anderson and his team observed a captive flock at the Philadelphia Zoo. Thermoregulation was offered as a reason for the flamingos' unusual posture because it was known that legs and feet were a significant source of heat loss in birds, and keeping one leg up close to the body would conserve heat. The persistent flamingo question still stands.The rationale behind the muscle fatigue theory: Standing on one leg would prevent both leg muscles from stiffening and tiring out, so that if a predator came along, the flamingo would be able to get moving faster. He’s found that more flamingos rest one-legged when temperatures drop, so he proposes that keeping warm might have something to do with it. The new study takes an important step toward understanding how flamingos stand on one leg, but doesn’t explain why, comments Matthew Anderson, a comparative psychologist at St. Keeping that leg retracted could take some energy, even if easy balancing saves some, he proposes. “The authors do not consider the retracted leg,” says Necker, who has studied flamingos. Reinhold Necker of Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, is cautious about calling one-legged stances an energy saver. ![]() Rob Felt/Georgia Tech (photo), Y-H Chang, L.H. When active, preening a feather or leaning to cackle at another youngster, the bird shows the biggest shifts. Measurements of one bird show the smallest shifts (red squiggles, right) of the center of pressure on its foot (in rectangles), where its weight is focused when the bird is quiescent, possibly dozing. The specimen’s body wasn’t as stable on two legs, the researchers found.Ī young flamingo hand-reared at Zoo Atlanta settles onto one foot on an instrument for tracking waverings in posture. 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. ![]()
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