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Flamingo one foot9/28/2023 Why do we care? This study was a fun inquiry that revealed how different standing on one leg is for a flamingo compared to a person. They can easily and for long periods hold what for us would quickly become a very uncomfortable squat pose – without using their muscles much at all. Since muscles aren’t active in a deceased animal, we interpreted this to mean that muscles must be activated for a flamingo to maintain a two-legged, but not a one-legged, posture.īefore our investigation, we might have assumed that it required a lot of muscle energy for a flamingo to stand on one leg. If we held the cadaver leg more upright – that is, more vertical when viewed from the front, resembling the posture when flamingos stand on two legs – the body was no longer stable. When the leg was angled inward (viewed from the front) like a one-legged pose, the joints became very stable. The angle of the cadaver leg when viewed from the front resembled the inward tilt we observe when the live animals are standing on one leg. Our findings show that gravity, along with specializations in flamingo anatomy, plays an important role in helping the animals stay stable on one leg without locking their joints, which may allow them to escape rapidly if necessary. Chang and Ting, Biology Letters Gravity plus anatomy do the job When we tried to manipulate the body, we found that the joints were quite stable in resisting the pull of gravity, but that the joints could be easily moved in the other direction.Įven in flamingo cadavers, the leg joints were very stable when tilted forward and backward. When we tilted the body forward and backward by up to 45 degrees, the body configuration was stable, with the knee keeping a right angle. If you hold it up by one leg like a lollipop at just the right angle, it passively adopts a body configuration that looks like a flamingo standing on one leg. While the actual mechanism is still unclear, we made an unanticipated discovery from a flamingo cadaver. Finding no clear demonstrations, we decided that we needed to do our own study of flamingo morphology – that is, the bird’s structural features, and how they function together. 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 bulk of a flamingo’s mass sits half a meter above the ground, on a single, slender leg.
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