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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.
African or european?
It's because the male birds refused to stop and ask directions, of course. Then, when they arrived at their destinations thousands of kilometers off course, they simply claimed it was where they *wanted* to go in the first place. Now, they have to fly back there every year, or admit they were wrong in the first place. Much easier to fly 11,200 kilometers twice a year.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The upper limit would be their weight in calories of fat (unless you count energy that they capture from the wind or whatever as 'required'). Apparently, a large female weighs about 1.4 pounds, which is about 4,900 Calories (kcals...).
Figure in that they are made out of stuff that they won't use up and it seems likely that it is some fraction of that.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
They were "unlikely to sleep?"
So Joe Scientist thinks there's a remote possibility that the birds napped en route during a "nonstop, over-water route?" WTF? Mind you, I'd pay good money to see it happen, but I really can't figure out how that would work.
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.
Admit it... you had to look it up (unless you're in physics or live outside the USA)
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
It's the first time I see the Godwit law apply right from the summary.
Oh wait...
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."
I imagine they spend a lot of that energy staying warm. Overheating is apparently a key issue for human athletes (so dumping a bunch of heat to the environment lets the birds work harder):
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/bemore.html
Still pretty impressive.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
those are only in bunnies.
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?
*Whoooosh* (btw zippthorne, no one expects the Spanish inquisition)
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
Yes, and allometric scaling too. I was not suggesting that birds and humans are directly comparable.
I was blown away simultaneously by two awesome facts; 1. that human-powered flight is achievable at all; 2. that it is just-barely achievable and attempting it is dangerous for even a top-notch athlete. These facts are simultaneously a signature of our human limitations and technological progress, and deserve imho to be mentioned.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
NB: As the same FAQ page you linked earlier points out, helicopter flight, as the project is attempting, is much more inefficient than winged flight. Human-powered flight with winged craft had already been achieved with fairly good results 20 years ago - almost 4 hours of flight covering 74 miles.