Flamingos Create Underwater Vortices to Capture Food

Rather than passively filter-feeding, the birds use their heads, beaks and feet to generate motion in the water that funnels invertebrates into their mouths.

Credit: Victor Ortega Jimenez | UC Berkeley

Flamingos have a natural ability to filter out food, like shrimp and worms, from the surrounding water, even in the most food-poor environments. Now, a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals how the birds use the power of physics to nab their elusive prey.

Victor Ortega Jiménez, an integrative biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of the study. He had previously observed that flamingos stomped their feet and submerged their beaks, but from the surface, he could only see ripples. The researcher wanted to know what was happening underwater. “We don’t know anything about what is happening inside,” he says in a statement. “That was my question.”

Smithsonian Magazine reports that Ortega Jiménez discovered that the flamingos cleverly use the motion of water to their advantage, combining techniques to funnel water - and the invertebrates within it - to their mouths. They’ll stomp their feet in dance-like motions to bring food up to the surface. Then, they’ll quickly bob their heads up and down to create tornado-like underwater vortices that help catch their prey more efficiently. The birds also snap or “chatter” their beaks and move their tongues in and out - and that chattering allows flamingos to capture seven times more brine shrimp.

“We are challenging the idea that flamingos are just passive filter feeders,” Ortega Jiménez told the New York Times. “Just as spiders produce webs, flamingos produce vortices.”