Tuesday, April 12, 2005
All You Need to Know and More
Pink plastic flamingos perched in the front yard get their pink from a factory. Real flamingos 'are what they eat.'
Flamingos live near salty or mineral-rich lakes and lagoons. To get a decent meal, a flamingo standing in shallow water must dunk its head to search for small mollusks and crustaceans, tasty insect larvae and algae and plankton. The trick is to snare the tiny creatures or microscopic plants without swallowing gallons of lake water.
Mouth filters are the answer to a flamingo's dilemma. A flamingo's bill is lined with rows of horned filters. Flamingos twist their long, graceful necks, turn their heads upside down and dip their bills underwater. Lake water passes through the filters, trapping tasty little animals and bits of plants.
In the early 1900s, painter and amateur naturalist Abbott Thayer proposed that the flamingo's pink color evolved as a way of protecting the birds from predators. How? Since flamingos feed mainly at sunset and sunrise, he said, their brilliant feathers blend seamlessly into the rosy-pink skies. Among others, U.S. president and fellow naturalist Teddy Roosevelt debunked (and actually ridiculed) the 'sunset theory.' Scientists have noted that the garish flamingo colors actually make the birds stand out against the blue-green water of the lakes in which they feed. A flamingo's color comes from the food it eats, they say, and doesn't seem to provide any kind of camouflage.
The word flamingo comes from the Latin word for 'flame,' but baby flamingos are anything but flaming. Born covered in dull gray feathers, flamingo chicks eat a dark red liquid called 'crop milk' that comes from their mother's and father's digestive tract. It takes about three years for a young flamingo's feathers to grow in rosy-pink.
Adult flamingos range in color from pale blush to Pepto-Bismol pink, crimson and orange-red. Their feather colors come from their dinners of brine shrimp, algae and plankton, which contain pigments called carotenoids. When flamingos eat food containing carotenoids the pigments are deposited directly in newly growing feathers.
(Shrimp accumulate red carotenoids from the algae and plankton they eat, too. In the shrimp's body, the carotenoids are linked to proteins, forming a complex tinted gray-blue. But when a steel-gray shrimp is boiled, the heat detaches the carotenoid from the protein, and the shrimp turns pink.)
Deprive pretty-in-pink flamingos of carotenoid-rich foods, and after a bird's old feathers drop, new feathers will grow out gray-white. So to keep zoo-bound flamingos in the pink, the big birds are fed a diet supplemented with carotenoids. The red carotenoid that colors the feathers of flamingos is a variant of beta-carotene, the pigment that makes carrots orange. If you went on an all-carrot diet - or even drank way too much carrot juice over time - your skin would gradually take on an orange cast, just as flamingo feathers turn pink. And you, too, could 'blend into the sunset.'"
The Newsday.com: complete article can be found here.
Flamingos live near salty or mineral-rich lakes and lagoons. To get a decent meal, a flamingo standing in shallow water must dunk its head to search for small mollusks and crustaceans, tasty insect larvae and algae and plankton. The trick is to snare the tiny creatures or microscopic plants without swallowing gallons of lake water.
Mouth filters are the answer to a flamingo's dilemma. A flamingo's bill is lined with rows of horned filters. Flamingos twist their long, graceful necks, turn their heads upside down and dip their bills underwater. Lake water passes through the filters, trapping tasty little animals and bits of plants.
In the early 1900s, painter and amateur naturalist Abbott Thayer proposed that the flamingo's pink color evolved as a way of protecting the birds from predators. How? Since flamingos feed mainly at sunset and sunrise, he said, their brilliant feathers blend seamlessly into the rosy-pink skies. Among others, U.S. president and fellow naturalist Teddy Roosevelt debunked (and actually ridiculed) the 'sunset theory.' Scientists have noted that the garish flamingo colors actually make the birds stand out against the blue-green water of the lakes in which they feed. A flamingo's color comes from the food it eats, they say, and doesn't seem to provide any kind of camouflage.
The word flamingo comes from the Latin word for 'flame,' but baby flamingos are anything but flaming. Born covered in dull gray feathers, flamingo chicks eat a dark red liquid called 'crop milk' that comes from their mother's and father's digestive tract. It takes about three years for a young flamingo's feathers to grow in rosy-pink.
Adult flamingos range in color from pale blush to Pepto-Bismol pink, crimson and orange-red. Their feather colors come from their dinners of brine shrimp, algae and plankton, which contain pigments called carotenoids. When flamingos eat food containing carotenoids the pigments are deposited directly in newly growing feathers.
(Shrimp accumulate red carotenoids from the algae and plankton they eat, too. In the shrimp's body, the carotenoids are linked to proteins, forming a complex tinted gray-blue. But when a steel-gray shrimp is boiled, the heat detaches the carotenoid from the protein, and the shrimp turns pink.)
Deprive pretty-in-pink flamingos of carotenoid-rich foods, and after a bird's old feathers drop, new feathers will grow out gray-white. So to keep zoo-bound flamingos in the pink, the big birds are fed a diet supplemented with carotenoids. The red carotenoid that colors the feathers of flamingos is a variant of beta-carotene, the pigment that makes carrots orange. If you went on an all-carrot diet - or even drank way too much carrot juice over time - your skin would gradually take on an orange cast, just as flamingo feathers turn pink. And you, too, could 'blend into the sunset.'"
The Newsday.com: complete article can be found here.
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