But the familiar and under-appreciated flamingo is hiding an unexpected and amazing secret; one that goes far deeper than their startling plumage. The most amazing thing about flamingos is this: they are extremophiles.

Flamingos, left to their own devices, don’t make their homes on lawns, or golf courses, or along the shores of pristine and idyllic ponds. They prefer to take advantage of the places the rest of us avoid. Like camels, penguins, and the giant tube worms that thrive near sulfur-spewing ocean vents, flamingos worldwide live their lives where most other creatures simply cannot. Though all flamingo species are pretty extreme, the smallest of them, the species we call the lesser flamingo, is likely the most extreme of all.

The lesser flamingos at Safari West live an easy lifestyle in a clean clear pond with a steady supply of food and free security. Their wild cousins, on the other hand, live an altogether more unpredictable lifestyle and spend much of their lives flying from one water source to another in an unending quest for food. The wild birds must also contend with predators; primarily hyenas and Maribou storks (imagine a cross between a cartoon stork and a vulture and you’re halfway there). One way they defend themselves from these opportunistic hunters is by hanging out in large flocks. Safety in numbers is a tried and true technique for many prey species.

Flamingos of all species flock and groups of several thousand are not uncommon. The lesser flamingos, however, take it to a whole new level. When they gather in the Great Rift Valley in East Africa (specifically in Lake Natron, their most famous watering hole), lesser flamingos can form super-flocks or up to a million and a half birds.

This is where the extremophile part comes in. Lake Natron is no average lake. You know, the kind with clear blue waters and ducks and fish and whatnot? Lake Natron is a chemical stew with water that is both salty and caustic. It also gets extremely hot; sometimes approaching temperatures of 140-degrees (that’s about the temperature in a medium-grilled steak). As you might imagine, not much lives in Natron. Fish are virtually non-existent and those that do survive there are hyper-specialist extremophiles like our flamingos and even so, they tend to stick to the clearer, cooler areas. Likewise, the lake is avoided by most other forms of life since its waters would be pretty poisonous to drink or bathe in (famously, some animals that die in the lake eventually wash up on shore, virtually fossilized by accreted calcium. If you Google Lake Natron you’ll be rewarded with some amazing photography and some controversy over how the photos are understood).

This lake—and others like it in the rift—are primarily home to a few varieties of cyanobacteria. Also called blue-green algae, these little organisms use the chemicals in the water and the light of the sun to survive. Despite the name, these blue-green algae are neither blue nor green but actually a vibrant red. When Natron experiences an algal bloom, the lake appears incredible, like a lake of lava, or if you’re feeling macabre, blood. Again, you can find some incredible images online. These blooms, in a lake with little competition for resources, can be enormous. Enter our lesser flamingos. They are among the few creatures capable of braving the hostile environment of the lake to capitalize on this calorie-rich and abundant food supply.

How then, does a bird consume microscopic, free-floating algae? At this point, you may be recalling a page from a high school biology text showing different kinds of bird beaks and their uses. The eagle has a hook-like beak for tearing into prey while the woodpecker has a straight and narrow one for drilling and collecting treats. What kind of beak is needed to survive on pond scum? Take a look at the flamingo beak and then think back to the last documentary you saw about humpback or gray whales. You might notice these very different creatures share a distinct and similar frown. There’s a spectacular reason for that. Both baleen whales and all flamingos survive by filter-feeding. In whales, there’s a comb-like structure inside the mouth called baleen. A similar feature can be found in the flamingo beak. The inside of a flamingo bill is lined with sturdy hair-like structures called lamellae. When they feed, flamingos use their tongue as a pump, sucking in algae rich water and pushing it back out through a filter of lamellae. This allows them to trap all those delicious little cyanobacteria while minimizing the amount of chemically intense water they swallow. This remarkably efficient filtering system allows each flamingo to consume 60 grams worth of invisibly tiny particles out of the water each day. When you tally up the totals for a flock of a million or more, it equates to approximately 60 tons (120,000 pounds) of cyanobacteria being filtered out of the lake each and every day the flamingos are in it.

There are about a million other reasons why flamingos in general, and lesser flamingos in particular, are some of the most amazing birds on the planet. For instance, the way they produce their remarkable color, the mystery of their one-legged posture, the wonder of their system for rearing young (look up “crop milk” some time). The point is that the next time you’re visiting Safari West or anywhere else that is home to a flock of flamingos, don’t overlook these impressive creatures. Not only are they capable of surviving in a super-saline, caustic environment on nothing but algae, they’re able to do it while looking fabulous. Show them some respect.

The post Safari Spotlight: Lesser Flamingo appeared first on Safari West.

What the Wright brothers did when they took inspiration from the birds was something we would now call biomimicry. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and developing a completely novel method of achieving flight, the brothers studied a naturally occurring predecessor for the technology they wished to develop. In the last decade or so, biomimicry has become an increasingly popular and structured philosophy centered around this simple idea: take inspiration from nature.

The driving logic of the biomimicry movement is quite compelling. The natural world is the oldest and most longest-running scientific experiment on the planet. When the Wright brothers became interested in aviation, humans had been tinkering with the idea for a handful of decades. Birds, bats, and insects, on the other hand, had had it mastered for millennia. Whereas the brothers had rugged gliders and hot air balloons to look to in the library of human aerial accomplishments, the biological world offered up millions of species and a few millennia worth of proven mechanics and techniques.

There is a broader argument motivating the biomimicry movement as well; one which revolves around the idea of efficiency. The efficiency found in the natural world is orders of magnitude beyond that of even our most stellar designs. Consider how much fuel it takes for one of our jet planes to cross the ocean verses the energy consumed by a frigate bird making the same trip. Certainly, we can do things faster and on a larger scale than your average living thing, but we accomplish these feats at the cost of being horrendously wasteful. In order to accomplish what the frigate bird accomplishes with a room-temperature metabolism and an irregular food supply, we have to drill for crude oil and chemically refine it in massive quantities. Our most efficient turbines burn this refined fuel far less efficiently and with more detrimental and persistent waste than the digestive tract and muscular metabolism of that bird. And the bird’s fuel is unrefined fish!

Here’s a better example of the natural world versus the human one. Mollusks—like snails or abalone—are able to produce protective shells with a very low energy cost that are durable, non-toxic, and at the end of the day, imminently bio-degradable. The human analogs of this biotechnology typically involve plastics, which are far more energy intensive to produce and so non-biodegradable that their buildup in our oceans now impacts the food web at every level. The philosophy of biomimicry argues that to achieve a more sustainable global ecosystem, we need processes and policies that are derivative of, or at the very least, inspired by those that occur naturally.

This is where biomimicry begins to butt up against conservation. The world of conservation is, at its core, the work of building a sustainable world. On a fundamental level, biological processes tend to be inherently sustainable. Thanks to the complexities of the food web, all the waste material our bodies can’t make use of are excreted and capitalized upon by other organisms. This “one man’s trash” style system eventually comes full circle in the food chain we learn about in elementary school.

Our waste (and eventually ourselves) become food for the decomposers, the bacteria, fungi, and worms. What they breakdown is put to use by the plants, which are eaten by the animals (including us), which are in their turn, food for the decomposers again. Ingenuity that takes its cues from these sustainable natural processes tends not to result in toxic waste, non-biodegradable detritus, and harmful pollution.

Now let’s take this abstract system into the world of the practical. There are several projects currently underway that exemplify the promise of biomimicry in design and engineering.

The classic story in the world of biomimicry comes from the world of Japanese bullet trains. The high-speed trains would compress air in front of them as they rocketed into tunnels. The result of this compression would be a deafening sonic-boom-like explosion at the far end of the tunnel as that air decompressed. Engineers tasked with resolving the issue wound up modeling a new nose for the train inspired by the king fisher bird, which dives into the water with nary a splash. The new nose did solve the booming problem. As a side-effect of adopting a design a few million years in the making, the trains also experienced a significant increase in fuel-efficiency and their top speed. This result garnered a great deal of attention and got a lot of people interested in the prospects of biomimicry.

Another promising prospect in development comes out of the study of whale flippers. If you’ve ever seen footage of humpback or gray whales, you may have noted how agile they are for their bulk. As it turns out, the scalloped leading edges on their flippers are the keys to this mobility. Those bumpy edges are an ingenious trick of anatomy that drastically reduces the force of drag on the flipper. This has implications for aviation and wind energy as well. An experimental wind farm was recently set up using turbine generators with scalloped blades. Not only were these turbines able to turn and generate power at much lower wind speeds, but with winds at 17 miles per hour, were able to produce nearly twice as much electricity as their non-scalloped contemporaries.

The really cool thing about this concept is that it isn’t limited to industrial labs and well-funded research facilities. Observing and learning from the natural world can be an everyday adventure, after all, the Wright brother’s insight into aircraft wings came from watching birds in their own backyard. In fact, here at Safari West, we’re doing a little biomimicry of our own.

Between our flamingo lagoons, the various ponds in the aviaries, and the koi-filled moat that surrounds lemur island, we have several very special water features on the property. Like nearly all man-made water features, they require attention and filtration. Traditional pond-upkeep involves bulky mechanical filters, hazardous chemicals, and a lot of work. Filters become fouled and have to be replaced regularly and the chemicals designed to kill the algae and pathogens in a pond can also be harmful to the desirable plants and animals. Why is this system so complex and inefficient? Because most ponds comprise only one component of an ecosystem and we’re left trying to make up for those missing parts with machinery and medicines. If we can find ways to incorporate more of the naturally occurring ecosystem services, we can improve efficiency, reduce chemical use and waste, and make the whole thing more beautiful to boot.

A feature the Safari West ponds and lagoons I’ve mentioned have in common are flowing streams and at least two pools each. Water is pumped into an upstream pool and then flows down a stream-bed to a second pool. From there it is pumped back up to the top. When the water reaches the top, it burbles up through a gravel bed in which trillions of microscopic bacteria make their homes. These bacteria thrive on the waste of birds, fish, and decaying vegetation. They are the first stage of our biological filter and unlike manmade filters, they are microscopic and invisible.

Now, these bacteria also produce waste, much of which is immediately consumed by other species of bacteria. At the end of the day, the final waste product of the various species is a phenomenal fertilizer. In an environment of standing water, this fertilizing food source is capitalized on by algae, which results in murky water and mats of green on every exposed surface. Oftentimes, the default solution to this problem is chemical, which kills the algae. The dead algae fall out of the water column and become food for those very same waste producing bacteria. So in a way, the chemicals used to kill the algae simply wind up turning that algae into food for more algae. The pond clears briefly and then, once the bacteria have had their meal, gets even murkier than it was before, creating an oftentimes escalating cycle of chemical intervention and frustration.

Another solution is to run all that bacteria filtered water down a meandering stream filled with plants. These plants compete with the algae for the same resource and thereby reduce the algal load and clarify the water. The end result is a beautiful water garden that takes advantage of natural processes to cycle waste through the system.

We currently have four such biofilters up and running at Safari West and the largest and newest of them is currently clearing the water at lemur island. If you’ve been to Safari West before, you’ve no doubt seen the massive koi who live in that circular lagoon. Come by again and you’ll be stunned. Although the biofilter is new and the plants and bacteria are still growing to fill their respective niches, the water has already cleared to the point you can see nearly to the bottom. The numerous red and gold koi school en masse around the lagoon, their supple shapes crisp and visible. Upstream, in the cascade coming from the freshly constructed upper lagoon, leggy water plants stretch toward the sun while their roots dip into the nutrient rich waters. It’s beautiful and growing lusher by the day. All of this accomplished, not with some novel chemical process, but simply by taking a page from nature’s book. Come visit us and see for yourself. The natural world is a beautiful thing, especially when you get out of the way and let it do what it already knows how to do best.

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