They found the flamingos swayed less as they became less active. In addition, the researchers analyzed eight live juvenile flamingos as the birds stood on a plate that measured forces they generated on the ground. This suggested it takes more active effort from muscles for the birds to stabilize a two-legged stance than a one-legged one, Ting said. Surprisingly, cadaver flamingos could not stably hold a two-legged pose. “If a dead flamingo could do it, then it is probably available for live birds to do.” “That was the ‘Aha!’ moment when we knew we were on to something special,” Chang said. The flamingo cadavers showed that the birds could passively support their body weight on one leg without any muscle activity. Even across wide angles of tilt - up to 75 degrees pitching the body backward - the knee and hip did not seem to budge.” (Credit: Rob Felt/Georgia Tech)Īs the scientists dissected the cadavers, Chang recalled picking up a bird by its leg below the knee and finding the body kept “surprisingly stable.

The insulation from the feathers is amazing - if anything, I had trouble thawing them out for our study and had to use heat lamps for several hours to get them thawed out.”Ĭhang and Ting with their research subjects. My cooler was not big enough! I spent the whole drive back to Atlanta nervous about them thawing out. However, when driving the birds back to the lab, Chang recalled that he “had not anticipated how long their legs would be. To help the scientists better understand flamingo anatomy, “we were very fortunate to get two frozen flamingo cadavers donated to us by another zoo,” Chang said. Chang’s prior work in zoos helped them conduct research on the birds at Zoo Atlanta. Neuromechanist Lena Ting at Emory University and her team previously examined how people standing on one leg kept their balance, which led comparative neuromechanist Young-Hui Chang at the Georgia Institute of Technology to suggest investigating flamingos. Another possibility that scientists raised over the years was that such a stance reduced muscle fatigue, but until now, researchers had not directly explored how much muscle activity the birds needed to balance on one leg. One prior explanation for the mystery of why flamingos stand on one leg is that it conserved body heat, as doing so places one less leg in the cool water where they feed.

Flamingo with one leg