![]() “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. Though it doesn't rule out other benefits of the posture, such as minimizing contact with parasites and fungi that might be present in the water they are wading in.Young-Hui Chang has two sons he likes to take to the zoo, where they enjoy watching, among other animals, the flamingos. While more research needs to be done, particularly in observing wild flocks of flamingoes, Anderson said his work, to be detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal Zoo Biology, shows that thermoregulation is a key reason behind the iconic flamingo stance. "So really needs as much heat saving as it can possibly get." "The water just pulls away the body heat really, really quickly," Anderson told LiveScience. The idea that a bird that lives in tropical climates would need to hold in its body heat may seem counter-intuitive, but flamingos spend most of their time in the water, and water causes them to lose body heat more rapidly - just think about the shiver that comes after getting out of a pool, even on a hot summer day. (Overall though, the majority of the flock favored standing on one leg.) They found that when it was warmer, more birds would stand on two feet, while in cooler weather, more favored the one-legged stance. To put the idea of thermoregulation to the test, the team noted the temperature and weather conditions when the flamingos were resting. If the theory was correct, the birds should take their first steps faster coming from the unipedal position, but Anderson found that the birds were faster off the block when they had been standing on both legs, ruling out that theory. To evaluate the muscle fatigue theory, the researchers watched the flamingos and timed how long it took for them to start moving from both unipedal and bipedal resiting positions. To test these ideas, Anderson and his team observed a captive flock at the Philadelphia Zoo. Thermoregulation was offered as a reason for the flamingos' unusual posture because it was known that legs and feet were a significant source of heat loss in birds, and keeping one leg up close to the body would conserve heat. The rationale behind the muscle fatigue theory: Standing on one leg would prevent both leg muscles from stiffening and tiring out, so that if a predator came along, the flamingo would be able to get moving faster.
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