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Why birds do not fall while sleeping
The only permanent bipeds of the animal kingdom alongside humans, birds have an extraordinary sense of balance. How do these direct descendants of the dinosaurs maintain this stability, especially when sleeping? Scientists recently succeeded in solving the mystery.
It may sound like a tall tale, but that is more or less the one recounted in a recent publication by a team of scientists at the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) and the CNRS, which explains in the pages of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface how birds can sleep while standing, without losing their balance. This enabled the researchers to reproduce the generic standing posture of birds, although their rendition was not at all stable, which is surprising given that we see them perched atop electric cables or tree branches without ever falling over. The idea with this discovery is to use such mechanisms in robotics in order to lighten masses in motion, consume less energy, use less materials in construction, and reduce danger in the event of a collision with an operator,” points out Philippe Wenger, a Senior Researcher at LS2N.
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