I watched a video about this but idk where. Anyone have the link?
Comment on A Woodpecker’s tongue is so long that it wraps around its skull
artifex@piefed.zip 1 week ago
It acts as a shock absorber for its brain.
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Deme@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
That is a common misconception. Shock absorption would diminish pecking performance. You want your hammer to be hard instead of soft if you want to get anything done. Woodpeckers have very stiff heads because of this.
thepig@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Damn, now I have a lot of questions about this weird tongue.
Deme@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
I’d guess that it just needs the space so it can extend that far into the tree, without blocking the airways.
alanjaow@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Your link says the page does not exist.
By my thinking, the damage to the brain could outweigh the better foraging. Then I thought that the brain mooshing into the front of the skull later in the peck would turn the head into a dead-blow hammer, which are still quite effective hammers.
“A dead-blow hammer delivers the momentum over a longer period, resulting in less peak force, but similar total driving effect for the same head weight.”
Deme@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
Huh, the link to the research article works for me. Weird. I’ll post the summary below. The woodpecker is trying to break the surface of the tree, whereas a dead-blow hammer “helpful in minimizing damage to the struck surface”, as said in that wikipedia article. The total impulse just means how much energy the bird is expending, whereas the peak force is what breaks the structure of the wood. So it’s beneficial to get as hard of an impact as possible with the highest possible peak force.
Van Wassenbergh S, Ortlieb E, Mielke M … Woodpeckers minimize cranial absorption of shocks Current Biology, 2022; 32, 3189-3194.e4
alanjaow@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Sweet, thanks for the info!
I was unsure of the effect of the dead-blow, since “minimizing damage” and “same driving force” sound contradictory to me. The latter makes it sound as if both would drive a nail to the same depth, and I was thinking the beak is effectively a nail. I’m glad the paper mentions concussions, and I’ll give em that bird and primate brains are probably similar enough in that respect.
Odd that the tongue wraps around though. I’d figure it would just slide down the neck, since that seems closer to what we have.