Latest news with #VictorOrtegaJiménez
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Flamingo physics shocks science world as birds form fish-catching tornadoes
Though flamingos often appear to feed serenely in shallow lakes, their hunting behavior is anything but passive. A new study reveals that these birds create swirling underwater vortexes to trap and consume live prey like brine shrimp, disproving their reputation as simple filter feeders. A research team at the University of California, Berkeley uncovered how flamingos use a coordinated sequence of footwork, head motion, and beak mechanics to engineer tiny underwater whirlpools that draw in their prey. 'Flamingos are actually predators, they are actively looking for animals that are moving in the water, and the problem they face is how to concentrate these animals, to pull them together and feed,' said Victor Ortega Jiménez. 'Think of spiders, which produce webs to trap insects. Flamingos are using vortices to trap animals, like brine shrimp.' In collaboration with Georgia Tech, Kennesaw State University, and the Nashville Zoo, the team studied Chilean flamingos both in captivity and through lab simulations. Using laser imaging and 3D-printed models of flamingo feet and beaks, they discovered that the birds stir up sediment with their webbed, floppy feet, generating spinning flows. Then, by pulling their heads upward through the water, the birds lift these whorls to the surface. While submerged upside down, the birds rapidly chatter their angled beaks—flattened and L-shaped—to create even finer vortexes that guide prey toward their mouths. Their beaks work like a pump, using these flows to suck in moving organisms and filter out unwanted particles. 'It seems like they are filtering just passive particles, but no, these animals are actually taking animals that are moving,' Jiménez said. At UC Berkeley, the researchers fitted a real flamingo beak to an actuator and used a small pump to simulate tongue action. 'The chattering actually is increasing seven times the number of brine shrimp passing through the tube,' he said. 'So it's clear that the chattering is enhancing the number of individuals that are captured by the beak.' 'We observed when we put a 3D printed model in a flume to mimic what we call skimming, they are producing symmetrical vortices on the sides of the beak that recirculate the particles in the water so they actually get into the beak,' Ortega Jiménez said. 'It's this trick of fluid dynamics.' This unique feeding strategy has potential applications beyond biology. The principles could help design better systems for filtering microplastics, self-cleaning filters based on vortex chattering, or locomotion techniques for robots in watery or muddy environments. 'Flamingos are super-specialized animals for filter feeding. It's not just the head, but the neck, their legs, their feet and all the behaviors they use just to effectively capture these tiny and agile organisms," Jiménez concluded. The findings have been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Flamingos conjure ‘water tornadoes' to trap their prey
A pink flamingo is typically associated with a laid back lifestyle, but the way that these leggy birds with big personalities feed is anything but chill. When they dip their curved necks into the water, the birds use their feet, heads, and beaks to create swirling water tornadoes to efficiently group their prey together and slurp up them up. The findings are detailed in a study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). 'Flamingos are actually predators, they are actively looking for animals that are moving in the water, and the problem they face is how to concentrate these animals, to pull them together and feed,' Victor Ortega Jiménez, a study co-author and biologist specializing in biomechanics at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. 'Think of spiders, which produce webs to trap insects. Flamingos are using vortices to trap animals, like brine shrimp.' In the study, the team from UC Berkley, Georgia Tech, Kennesaw State University in Marietta, Georgia and the Nashville Zoo looked at a group of Chilean flamingos (Phoenicopterus chilensis) in the Nashville Zoo and 3D printed models of their feet and L-shaped bills. 'Flamingos are super-specialized animals for filter feeding,' Ortega Jiménez said. 'It's not just the head, but the neck, their legs, their feet and all the behaviors they use just to effectively capture these tiny and agile organisms.' Flamingo feet are webbed, but like many wading birds, they are also floppy. When feeding, the birds use their feet to churn up the sediment at the bottom of shallow water. The flamingos then propel the sediment forward with little whorls that they draw up to the surface by jerking their heads upwards like a plungers–creaing these mini water tornadoes. The whole time, the birds' heads stay upside down within the watery vortex, with their angled beaks moving to create smaller vortices that bring the sediment and food up into their mouths. Inside the mouth, the sediment is strained out. [ Related: Why flamingo milk is pink. ] Among birds, flamingo beaks are unique. They are flattened on the angled front end, so that when the head is upside down in the water, the flat portion is still parallel to the bottom. This helps flamingos deploy another technique called skimming. They use their long S-shaped neck to push its head forward while rapidly clapping its beak. The motion creates sheet-like vortices that trap prey. The tiny tornados were strong enough to trap typically agile brine shrimp and microscopic crustaceans called copepods. 'It seems like they are filtering just passive particles, but no, these animals are actually taking animals that are moving,' Ortega Jiménez said. When the team created a 3D model of the L-shaped beak, they found that pulling the head straight upward in the water creates a vortex. This vortex swirling around a vertical axis concentrates food particles at a speed of up to 1.3 feet per second. The fluid principles the team discovered in flamingos could have some engineering applications in the future. It could help engineers develop better systems for concentrating and sucking up tiny particles from water, potentially the ultra prolific microplastics. They could also be applied to better self-cleaning filters or robots that can walk and run in mud the way flamingos can.
New York Times
12-05-2025
- Science
- New York Times
Flamingos Summon Mini-Twisters to Suck Up Prey
If you've ever really looked at how flamingos eat, you know how captivatingly peculiar it is. They bob their inverted heads in the water and do a kind of waddle cha-cha as they inch their way across shallow water, filter-feeding small crustaceans, insects, microscopic algae and other tiny aquatic morsels. Victor Ortega-Jiménez, an integrative biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, remembers being fascinated by this behavior the first time he saw it in 2019, during a trip with his wife and child to the Atlanta zoo. Ever since, he has been wondering what, exactly, was going on beneath the surface. 'The birds looked beautiful, but the big question for me was, 'What's happening with the hydrodynamic mechanisms involved in flamingos' filter feeding?'' he said. Back home, he was surprised to find no explanation in the scientific literature — so he decided to produce one himself. Several years of meticulous research later, he and his colleagues arrived at a surprising discovery, described Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Flamingos, they found, are active predators that harness the physics of how water flows to sweep up prey and funnel it directly into their mouths. 'We are challenging the idea that flamingos are just passive filter feeders,' Dr. Ortega-Jiménez said. 'Just as spiders produce webs, flamingos produce vortices.' Dr. Ortega-Jiménez's collaborators included three exceptionally cooperative flamingos from the Nashville Zoo: Mattie, Marty and Cayenne. Zookeepers trained the birds to feed in a clear container, which allowed the researchers to record what was happening using high-speed cameras and fluid dynamic methods. The scientists generated oxygen bubbles and added food particles to measure and visualize the flow of the water as the birds fed. After initial observations with the live birds, the team built a 3-D model of a flamingo head and used it to more precisely explore the birds' biomechanics. Flamingos, they found, frequently and quickly retract their heads as they feed. Each of those motions creates a tornado-like vortex and an upwelling of particles from the bottom toward the water's surface. Further observation and experiments with the mechanical beak revealed that chattering, in which flamingos rapidly clap their beaks while their heads are lifted but still underwater, is responsible for causing the mini-twisters to flow directly toward the birds' mouths, helping them capture prey. Their bent, L-shaped beaks were also critical for generating vortices and recirculating eddies as they fed at the water's surface, reaping the rewards of those engineered flows. Another 'amazing finding,' Dr. Ortega-Jiménez said, was what the birds do with their feet, which the researchers explored using a mechanical flamingo foot and computational modeling. The dancing-like motion of their webbed appendages underwater produced yet more vortices that pushed additional particles toward the birds' waiting mouths as they fed upside down in the water. Taken together, these findings suggest that flamingos are 'highly specialized, super feeding machines that use their entire body for feeding,' Dr. Ortega-Jiménez said. Sunghwan Jung, a biophysicist at Cornell University who was not involved in the study, praised the work for being 'an outstanding demonstration of how biological form and motion can control the surrounding fluid to serve a functional role.' Alejandro Rico-Guevara, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, also not involved in the work, agreed that the new paper puts to rest the notion that flamingos are passive in the way they filter feed. 'There have been many hypotheses surrounding how their odd bills could work,' he said, 'but until recently we didn't have the tools to study it.' In addition to solving that mystery and revealing 'a uniquely evolved way to capture tiny and evasive prey,' he continued, the research suggests another evolutionary reason for webbed feet in birds, beyond just being good paddles. Now that Dr. Ortega-Jiménez's curiosity about flamingo-instigated fluid dynamics has been satisfied, he plans to turn his attention to what is going on inside the birds' beaks during feeding. Taken together, such findings could eventually lead to bioinspired technologies that capture things like toxic algae or microplastics, he said. 'What's at the heart of filter feeding in flamingos?' he said. 'We as scientists want to understand both the form and function of these fascinating and mysterious birds as they interact with their fluid environment.'
