SCIENCE LAB SCHEME* : HEADS DOWN BEHAVIOUR

' LUNCH arrives for flamingos in a whirlpool of their own design.' If you've ever really looked at how flamingos eat, you know how 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 morsels.

Victor Ortega-Jimenez, an integrative biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, remembers being fascinated by this behaviour during a 2019 trip with his wife and child to the Atlanta zoo.

Ever since, he has been wondering what, exactly, was going on beneath the surface.

Several years of meticulous research later, he and his colleagues arrived at a surprising discovery, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Flamingos, they found, are predators that harness the physics of how water flows to sweep up prey and funnel it into their mouths.

'' We are challenging the idea that flamingos are just passive feeders,'' Dr. Ortega-Jimenez said. '' Just as spiders produce webs, flamingos produce vortices.''

The Publishing continues to Part [2]