Contrary to popular belief, woodpeckers don ’t protect their brains when headbanging trees
This study was really an advance because they put real data to the question.”
Whether digging for food, constructing housing, or luring mates, woodpeckers bang their heads into trees about 20 times per second. And then they go about their day. When a football player rams into an opponent, their head comes to a stop but their brain continues forward, compressing in the front and stretching in the back, sometimes
damaging the brain
.
But woodpeckers, despite smacking with accelerations three times the human concussion threshold, seem to escape unharmed, says Sam Van Wassenbergh, a biomechanist at the University of Antwerp and lead author on the study. This impressive resilience led previous researchers to search for a specialized structure protecting the birds. Some hypothesized its
spongy skull bone
could act as an airbag
, whereas others proposed its
elongated tongue
could be a seatbelt for the brain
.
Van Wassenbergh and his colleagues took another approach: They analyzed whether the pecking birds were really cushioning their blows. The researchers recorded 109 high-speed videos of six woodpeckers from three species: the black woodpecker (
Dryocopus martius
), the pileated woodpecker (
D. pileatus
), and the great-spotted woodpecker (
Dendrocopos major
). Tracking points on their beaks and heads as the animals pecked on wood, the scientists found that
all the woodpecker skull...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news
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