Flemmentsos create water tornadoes to trap their prey

Flemish Mingos stands serenely in a shallow alkaline lake with submerged heads may seem to eat placely, but many things happen below.

Thanks to studies on Chilean flamingos in the Nashville zoo and the analysis of 3D printed models of their feet and their L -shaped invoices, the researchers have documented how birds use their feet, their heads and their beaks to create a storm of swirling tornado, or whirlwinds, in the water to concentrate effectively and bring their prey.

“The flamings are in fact predators, they actively seek animals that move in water, and the problem they face is how to concentrate these animals, to bring them together and eat,” Victor Ortega Jiménez, assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of California in Berkeley, who specializes in biomechanics said. “Think of spiders, which produce networks to trap insects. Flamations use whirlpools to trap animals, such as briefs of brine.”

Ortega Jiménez and collaborators of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta; Kennesaw State University in Marietta, Georgia (Ksu-Marietta); And the Nashville zoo has published their conclusions this week in the newspaper Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers noted that the flamations use their disquketing feet to repel the lower sediments and propel it forward in verticles that birds then draw on the surface by shaking their head up like divers, creating mini-cannons. During all this time, the heads of the birds remain upside down in the aqueous vortex, their tilted spouts chattering to create smaller whirlpools that run sediments and food in their mouths, where it is tense.

The beak of a flamingo is unique to be flattened on the tilt front end, so that when the head of the bird is upside down in the water, the flat part is parallel to the bottom. This allows flamingo to use another technique called skimming. This involves using your long s in the shape of a head to push your head forward while quickly applauding your beak, creating leaf -shaped whirlpools – Kármán whirlpools – this tray of trap.

This series of active food behaviors believes that Flamingo’s reputation as a passive filtering feeder said Ortega Jiménez.

“It seems that they filter passive particles, but no, these animals really take animals that move,” he said.

The principles he discovered could be used to design better systems to concentrate and suck up tiny particles, such as microplastics, water; Better self -cleaning filters, based on chatter; Or robots which, like flamingos, can walk and run in mud.

Chatter

Ortega Jiménez, originally from Puebla, in Mexico, became fascinated by the eating behavior of the Flemings during a visit to the Atlanta zoo with his wife and daughter before the Pandemic Covid-19. Filming the bird feeding of birds, it only observed undulations on the surface.

“We don’t know anything about what’s going on. It was my question,” he said.

At the time, a postdoctoral scholarship holder of Kennesaw State University in Georgia, Ortega Jiménez focused on the Flamant’s food as his next research project. He considers himself, he said, as a modern Darwinian naturalist, investigating the behavior of animals of all types, nematodes and flies towards tails and birds, focusing on how animals interact and manipulate their environment, including air, water and electromagnetic fields.

From the state of Kennesaw, he moved to the Georgia Institute of Technology to work in the Saad Bhamla laboratory, where he collaborated with the engineers, and they had access to the Chilean Flemish at the Nashville Zoo. The team filmed them by feeding on a large tray, using a laser to light up the gas bubbles in the water to see the whirlpools created by the animal heads and beaks.

After having moved to the University of Maine in Orono as an assistant teacher, Ortega Jiménez refined the 3D printed models of a beak and a flamingo foot to study more precisely the movement of water and particles during the applauding, or “chattering”, that birds use during consumption.

In 2024, he again moved to UC Berkeley, where he conducted experiences to see how effective chatter and trampling were to capture live brush. The new article sums up all these collaborative works.

In UC Berkeley, he tied a real flamingo beak to an actuator to simulate chatter and added a small pump in the mouth to simulate the tongue and suck the salum shrimp captured by the mouth. With this configuration, he was able to establish that chatter is the key to the Flamant diet.

“The chatter actually increases the number of salum shrimps seven times crossing the tube,” he said. “It is therefore clear that the chatter improves the number of individuals captured by the beak.”

Stomp dance

The power behavior begins with the feet, said Ortega Jiménez. If you look at a very shallow flamingo in water, you can often see his dance or circular dance behavior.

The feet are webbed, but as with many birds in paddles, they are disk, so that when the bird lifts a foot, the strap collapses and moves away from the bottom without the suction that makes humans difficult to walk in the mud. By walking or running, the flamingos seem to slide their feet into the water instead of trampling, a technique that could help robots walking in water or mud.

Ortega Jiménez has created rigid and flexible Flamanto feet models to compare how the two conceptions affect the flow of fluid, and he found that flexible feet are much more effective for pushing sediment swirls in front of each stage. Rigid straps mainly produce turbulence.

Creating a 3D model of the L -shaped beak, he was able to show that pulling his right head up in the water creates a vortex swirling around a vertical axis, concentrating again particles of food. He measured the speed of the head at around 40 centimeters per second (1.3 feet per second). Small tornadoes were strong enough to trap even agile invertebrates, such as brine shrimp and microscopic crustaceans called copépods.

The chatter also creates whirlwinds around the beak. In this case, the flamingo maintains its stationary upper beak, although it is capable of an independent movement, and only moves the lower beak – about 12 times per second during the chatter, discovered Ortega Jiménez.

Tien Yee, co-author of the article and professor at KSU-MARRIETA, used the dynamics of computer fluid to simulate 3D flow on a computer around the beak and feet. He confirmed that whirlwinds concentrate particles, similar to the experiments using a 3D printed head in a channel with briefs of brine actively swimming and eggs of briefs of brine passively floating.

“We have observed that when we put a 3D printed model in a channel to imitate what we call skimming, they produce symmetrical swirls on the sides of the beak which recircule the particles in the water so that they enter the beak,” said Ortega Jiménez. “It is this tip of fluid dynamics.”

His next projects are to determine the role of the flamingo piston’s tongue and how the comic strips of the beak filter preveses out to brackish and sometimes toxic water.

“Flamations are super specialized animals for feeding filters,” he 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.”

In addition to Yee, other co-authors of the article are the postdoctoral colleague Pankaj Rohilla, the graduate student Benjamin Seleb and Professor Saad Bhamla at Georgia Tech; And Jake Belair of the Nashville Zoo in Tennessee.