![]() ![]() “Studying how nature solves problems of legs would be helpful for engineers,” he says. Chang spends most of his time studying human amputees and exploring how people walk with prosthetics. ![]() “Now you can look for it in other species because you know what to look for.” “Flamingos, they just represent the extreme of this behavior,” Chang says. Previous scientists had guessed that the pose might reduce muscle fatigue, but Chang’s work proves the bird doesn’t really need to use muscles at all.įlamingos are the most notorious of avian balancers, so understanding their secret may help scientists see less obvious balancing mechanisms in other species, from ducks and herons to sandpipers and pigeons. It’s a convenient trick that keeps the bird stable-and since a dead bird’s body can do it, it can’t possibly require energy. “It wasn’t falling over, the joints weren’t coming undone.” ![]() “It was almost like a flamingo lollipop,” Chang says. This posture pinned the whole leg in place Chang could rest the flamingo’s toes on his hand and the pose held steady. When he positioned the flamingo corpse on one leg, its hip and knee joints naturally aligned so that the foot was positioned beneath the center of its body. Their knee joints are buried beneath their feathers where you’d imagine their hip joint might be what we see as a long flamingo leg is actually just its calf, ankle, foot, and toes. He dissected them and examined their legs, which for flamingos are unusual even among birds. To find the mechanism that made their easy stability possible, Chang asked a local zoo for the corpses of two Caribbean Flamingos to study. Those results suggested that the birds have some trick to keep their balance during one-legged sleep that doesn’t rely on their muscles. The force platform drawings showed that active flamingos-which shift between standing on one leg and on two-exhibit seven times more sway than the quiet, sleeping birds. Then they gradually settled in, picked a leg up, and quieted down, sometimes even falling asleep. The birds fussed around for a while, craning their necks and chattering. It measures the direction of force as well as the amount of force, and then generates a drawing that displays those changes in your center of gravity: The bigger the drawing, the more sway and the more muscles are working.Ĭhang and his colleague-with help from keepers at Zoo Atlanta-put eight juvenile Chilean Flamingos on a force platform. “I call it kind of a glorified bathroom scale,” Chang says. Physiologists have a nifty device called a force platform that can measure that off-balance sway. Each time you tip forward, muscles contract to pull you backward, and vice versa. That wobbly feeling-maybe located in your ankle, or elsewhere in your leg-is your leg muscles working to keep your weight centered over your foot. Take a moment or two to stand on one leg. So Chang, a physiologist at Georgia Tech, decided to do some experiments to find out. But most parents don't have a good answer, instead stumbling through an expanation. While at the flamingo exhibit, it's not unusual for Chang to overhear other kids ask their parents how the top-heavy pink birds manage to stand on one leg with such nonchalance. Young-Hui Chang has two sons he likes to take to the zoo, where they enjoy watching, among other animals, the flamingos. ![]()
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