![]() ![]() But if that was the main reason, “one would expect flamingos to employ the one-legged resting stance constantly,” Anderson says. The posture certainly helps them to save energy. Matt Anderson from St Joseph’s University, who studies flamingos, praises the study, but he notes that explaining how the birds stand on one leg doesn’t tell us why they do. So, counter-intuitively, flamingos are actually more stable on one leg than on two. In a two-legged stance, both legs are perfectly vertical, and the joints become more unstable. “If you press down on the front of the bird, it’s very solid.” And this only works on one leg. “You definitely feel a very large difference if you just get it in the right posture,” he says. Even when he tilted the bird at a 45-degree angle, the leg didn’t buckle. When Chang held the bird up by the shin, he engaged the same mechanics. These two changes, combined with gravity’s pull and the shape of the leg bones, keeps all the joints in place. Second, the center of mass moves to just in front of the flamingo’s (hidden) knee, so its body weight naturally pulls the hip and knee forward. First, the leg inclines so that the foot moves from being directly under the hip to being directly under the center of the body. When a flamingo shifts onto one leg, two things happen. The two long bones that you see extending downwards are, respectively, the shin and a fusion of several foot bones. (Look at the image below, in which I’ve marked the top parts of the flamingo’s right leg.) Birds are perpetually crouching, holding their thigh bones almost horizontally against their bodies. The real knee is much higher it’s obscured by the feathers on the bird’s belly and bends in the same way ours do. Many people think that birds have backward-bending knees, but the joint that they think of as the “knee” is actually the ankle. To understand why that worked, it will help to clarify some terms, because bird legs are deeply confusing. “The flamingos … when they fall asleep, sometimes they projectile poop.” Back in his lab, he and Ting defrosted and dissected the birds. They had been frozen, so Chang drove over with a cooler. They put a call out to local zoos, and within a day, Birmingham Zoo said that they had recently euthanized two flamingos because of poor health. In lieu of that, the duo decided they needed a detailed look at the birds’ legs. “We really wanted to do an experiment where we just walked over and gave them a little prod,” says Chang. The birds are so steady that no one at the zoo could remember an instance of a flamingo falling over. Its body swayed less, and its center of gravity moved by mere millimeters. And as it lost consciousness, Chang and Ting saw that it became more stable. We just had to sit around and wait for the flamingos to fall asleep.” Some of the youngsters did eventually cooperate, and one even fell asleep while standing on the plate. ![]() “I’m used to studying things that walk or run, where you have to chase them across the force-plate or have them chase you,” says Chang. “The first question people ask is: How do they stand on one leg?” So he teamed up with Ting, an expert in postural control at Emory University, to find out.įirst, they went to Zoo Atlanta with a force-plate-a fancy 3-D bathroom scale that measures the forces a foot exerts in all directions. “When I take my kids to the zoo, the first thing you see is the flamingo exhibit,” says Chang, who’s based at Georgia Tech. You can pose a flamingo cadaver on one leg, and leave it there. And as Chang and Ting found, they can even keep balanced when dead. When they raise a leg, their body weight shifts in a way that naturally stabilizes the joints of their standing limb, so they can remain upright without any muscular activity. To maintain our balance, we constantly use our muscles to make tiny adjustments to our posture. ![]() Standing on one leg “is a challenging yoga posture, and a test of coordination that people use,” says Ting. “We weren’t expecting it to be stable, but it totally was.” And Chang probably looked like a fever-dream version of Mary Poppins, holding a dead flamingo aloft like the world’s unlikeliest umbrella. The flamingo looked almost like it was sleeping-one leg extended, the other bent, and the head tucked back into its feathers. And then Ting said: Why don’t you try and pick it up by the leg?Ĭhang grabbed the bird by its shin and held it upright-and the leg snapped into place, becoming rigid and unyielding. With the bird lying flat on their table, they tried moving its legs this way and that. But when they started dissecting one, they couldn’t find anything. He and a fellow biologist Lena Ting suspected that the pink birds might have features on their legs that help lock their joints in place. Young-Hui Chang can remember exactly when he realized how flamingos balance so effortlessly on one leg. ![]()
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