Can someone clarify how birds find it energy efficient to stand on one leg?
I can’t get my head around the idea of shifting the body weight onto one leg is easier for energy/heat conservation if the leg in use will be working more, taking more load.
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Yes, it will be taking more load, but it’s not using twice as much energy. Birds use energy to keep warm and other functions, so there are energy savings with the other leg, that’s tucked up into the feathers.
Because if they don’t tuck one of the legs up they start losing heat thru both legs pretty rapidly. Which is a waste of energy because heat loss is directly related to surface area, and when they tuck up one leg that reduces the surface area they lose heat from. Basically the same thing as a person that’s cold keeping their arms tucked close to their chest.
Using a single leg doesn’t use much, if any, more energy since they (as in their entire body) are still supporting the exact same load regardless.
Bird’s legs aren’t covered in feathers and are thus uninsulated. They also have blood flow through the legs specifically to exchange heat, much like a. Ar’s radiator or even a dog panting.
By standing only on one leg, and tuck the other, they cut down on the heat loss to this and conserve it when they’d rather keep the heat than cool off.
Also, your assumption that they’re working hard by using only one leg may not be true. I don’t specifically know if this is true for standing but animals often have adaptations that are counter to how people work.
For example, bats sleep upside down effortlessly because their natural at rest claw state is to grasp. They have to expend energy to open their claw, versus humans who expend to clamp down.
I’d not be surprised if birds are at rest standing in ways we are not.
It’s energy efficient not because of physical effort/effort to stand, but because birds spend energy to warm them body. Since most of their is covered in feathers, they are extremely well insulated. Their legs and feet however are exposed so they most the majority of their body heat through that exposure. It’s sort of like how you might stick one leg out from under the covers of your bed when you’re hot, but both legs out are too cold. So you only stick one leg out and that’s a nice comfortable medium place.
At least for one bird, the flamingo, its legs actually have a kind of “locking” mechanism which enables all the joints to be stabilized without requiring any muscle activity. So it actually takes essentially no energy at all for them to stand that way – just as a table doesn’t need any energy to stand on its legs either. This locking mechanism only “activates” when they’re in this one-leg-tucked stance, which is how they sleep.
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