REAL LIFE NEWS: WHY DO FLAMINGOS STAND ON ONE LEG?
by Hazed
Because if they lifted both legs, they’d fall over. Ba-doom tish!
I learned that rather feeble joke from a joke book when I was about six. But now scientists have come up with the real answer. Flamingos stand on one leg because it uses less energy than taking a two-legged stance.
When they stand on one leg they employ no muscular effort. A passive mechanism is engaged which allows them to stand up while having a doze.
Previous theories about this one-legged position were that it helped to regulate body temperature, or that it reduced muscle fatigue as the birds alternated the leg they were standing on.
But Prof Young-Hui Chang, from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta, and Lena H Ting, of Atlanta’s Emory University conducted a series of experiments with both live and dead birds and found the mechanical secrets behind the one-leg trick.
Surprisingly, they discovered that a dead flamingo can be made to stand up on one leg without any external support. They describe this unexpected phenomenon as a “passive gravitational stay mechanism”.
Prof Chang explained, “If you look at the bird from the front, while they’re standing on one leg, the foot is directly beneath the body which means that their leg is angled inward. That’s the pose you have to strike in order to engage the stay mechanism.”
It turns out that it’s impossible to make a bird cadaver balance using two legs, which suggests that it requires an active muscle force to maintain this posture.
The researchers also studied live flamingos. They found that when the birds stood on one leg and rested, they hardly moved at all, which demonstrates the stability of this passive position.
So I guess the old joke is now obsolete. I will have to go with another one from my old childhood book. Such as: what’s big, red and eats rocks? A big red rock-eater. Groan!
