How Geese Get Enough Oxygen Flying Over Himalayas
For the bar-headed goose, migration is a high-altitude adventure. Spring and fall it flies between Central Asia and India, a route that takes it over the highest mountains in the world, the Himalayas. The bird has been known to reach altitudes of 30,000 feet.
At such heights, the air is so thin that there’s only about a quarter of the oxygen available at sea level. Yet the goose is able to sustain the level of O2 consumption — 10 to 20 times normal — needed for flapping flight.
How does it do this? In a paper in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Graham R. Scott, a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia, and colleagues show that it has a lot to do with the bird’s muscles.
Mr. Scott and his colleagues examined pectoral muscles from bar-headed geese and compared them to those from related species, like barnacle geese, that don’t fly at extreme altitudes. They found little difference among the birds in the amount and types of muscle fibers. But the bar-headed geese had more capillaries around the individual muscle cells, and within cells, more of the mitochondria — which use oxygen to supply energy to the cell — were nearer the cell membrane.“ The oxygen doesn’t have to diffuse as far,” Mr. Scott said.
He said the changes in the muscle cells probably evolved over a long period of time, perhaps as the Himalayas, one of the Earth’s youngest mountain chains, grew and the birds would have had to fly higher and higher.
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2 comments:
Some notes we use here at PCa:
FACT 1:
As each goose flaps its wings it creates an "uplift" for the birds that follow. By flying in a "V" formation, the whole flock adds 71%
greater flying range than if each bird flew alone.
LESSON:
People who share a common direction and sense of community
can get where they are going quicker and easier because they are
traveling on the thrust of one another.
More in the email I sent you.
Yes, the lessons from the Geese Formation are very apt for situations or organizations where teamwork leads to success. Incidentally, running, in general, is an individual sport, and going behind another runner to benefit from his/her windbreak is considered illegal (it is referred to as drafting behind another runner).
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