Turns Out, Flamingos Are Predators
Photo by BrendanBealePhotography/Shutterstock.com
Ah, the flamingo. Majestic and beautiful, the fabulous fowl sparks wonder and joy among its human admirers. Among shrimp, their reputation is less pristine.
Shrimp have much to fear in the waters they wander, but flamingos make the list. Would you like to be enveloped in a water tornado while a death portal swallows its terrorized targets? No, you wouldn’t - flamingos are no angels.
“Flamingos are actually predators,” Victor Ortega Jiménez, an assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, told UC Berkeley News in May. “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.”
We have written before about the tactics flamingos employ to source their sustenance, but a recent study by researchers from Georgia Tech, Kennesaw State-Marietta, and the Nashville Zoo produced findings that broke the process down even further.
The researchers trained Chilean flamingos at the Nashville Zoo to eat in a camera-intensive aquarium for a few weeks. They observed how the birds aimed tornadoes at their prey through precise head movements and excellent utilizations of their webbed feet and curved beaks - there’s a lot more to it than a simple stomp and search.
“Think of spiders, which produce webs to trap insects,” Ortega Jiménez said. “Flamingos are using vortices to trap animals, like brine shrimp.”
What looks like a simple filtering process is much more calculated, but no one had dived deep enough to know until the question entered Ortega Jiménez’s mind while visiting Zoo Atlanta with his family several years ago. The then-postdoctoral fellow at Kennesaw State made the topic his next endeavor. Multiple years, universities, and in-depth studies later, his work has culminated in this fascinating discovery.
“The chattering actually is increasing seven times the number of brine shrimp passing through the tube,” Ortega Jiménez explained about a flamingo beak simulator he built to mimic the bird’s feeding technique. “So it’s clear that the chattering is enhancing the number of individuals that are captured by the beak.”
The video footage captured and posted on YouTube unveils all. Through these series of short clips, you can see how what can easily appear as a simple filter feed is really an intentional operation.
This is not the end of the research for Ortega Jiménez and the rest of his team. Their sights are now set on the tongue and filtering ridges of the beak. Apparently, flamingos don’t mess around when it comes to dinnertime.
“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.”
