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Small Bird Astounds Scientists With 11,200km Flight
Zeb writes "Scientists are marveling over a small female bar-tailed godwit somewhere in New Zealand who has a world record for non-stop flying — an epic 11,200 kilometers. A major international study into the birds has been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B and it offers an explanation as to why the godwits fly so far from Alaska to New Zealand in a single bound. The birds flew non-stop for up to and covered more than 11,200km. The flight path shows the birds did not feed en route and would be unlikely to sleep." The linked Wikipedia entry claims an even longer trip record, of 11,570 kilometers.
The record is actually for flying the furthest in eight days across the Pacific, not the furthest non-stop flight ever as implied by the headline. Which is not surprising - the common swift, for example, can spend years in the air without landing. http://www.commonswift.org/records_english.html
Nonetheless, these birds are still impressive.
I've seen birds (sooty terns) that can spend years in the air. I've been told that they can let one part of their brain sleep while they use the other part to fly. They only need to land when they build a nest and lay eggs. You can go outside at night and see them soaring in the air currents.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Long-distance migratory birds can stock up for flights by putting on fat roughly up to their lean weight, so a 630g godwit may only weigh about 315g at the end of its migration. Roughly, you're looking at about 2500kcals burned during the eight day flight, which is astonishing for an animal with about 1% of the weight of a human. This is about 0.0036kcal/second, or approximately 15 watts. Elite human athletes can produce about 6 watts per kg of body mass, while this bird can sustain 30 watts/kg for over a week.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
No kidding. See this reference about engineering human-powered flight: http://www.mech.ubc.ca/~hph/faq.htm#14
"We have built our own test rig that measures power output of a pilot over a minute duration. We have plotted the results of numerous potential pilots against their weight. A successful candidate is one that falls above a power requirement curve (power vs. weight). ... We have had people vomit after these one-minute tests. In similar tests in the United States they have had one person have a mild heart attack."
And that's for one minute of (theoretical) flight... incredible.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
You are familiar with that whole square-cube thing, right?
Birds are amazing athletes, but there's a reason why the largest flying species is around 20 kilos.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Indeed. There are two natural, common units when talking about distances of that scale. Kilometers (~10,000 of them takes you from pole to equator) and Nautical Miles (1 minute of arc each)
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Some birds can indeed sleep while flying, most famously swifts and albatrosses. Some birds also have the capacity to go half-asleep: they close one eye and let that half of the brain rest (Google "unilateral eye closure birds sleep").