Animal of the week: A woodpecker doesn’t get a concussion because its brain doesn’t idle

Russia has been banging his head against a hard obstacle in Ukraine for four years now without achieving anything. Tikkak also bangs its head against the tree all day, but there is some reason and motive in its actions.

How the hell does a woodpecker not get a concussion? There are several answers to a frequently asked question.

A surprising amount of research has been done on the structure and flexibility of the dart head. Even every year, new studies on the subject appear.

This it is known: the tip of a dart hits a tree at a speed of seven meters per second and stops like a wall.

Its head is subjected to a deceleration of over a thousand g-forces. It is many times more than a blow that causes a concussion to a person.

However, the woodpecker does not hit the woodpecker’s brain, the force is distributed evenly. Researchers are still divided on what is actually going on.

The old idea is that the head of the dart acts as a shock absorber: the two-pronged lingual bone of the dart, for example, goes around the entire skull and can smooth out shocks.

There is also very little fluid in the woodpecker’s brain, so the brain does not slouch inside the skull. The strike movement of the dart is also completely stable and straight, and its head cannot swing or to take a trip to the pages.

Since it has been suggested that, in fact, the head of the dart does not even absorb the impact, the bird is simply not damaged by the beating.

That’s what a group of researchers reasoned a couple of years ago, after watching slow-motion videos of beak strikes.

If the energy of the impact were dampened, darting would require correspondingly more energy from the dart.

“When hitting nails, you don’t put a pillow between the nail and the hammer either,” compared the biomechanics researcher Thomas Roberts Science- science journal in 2022.

New research Journal of Anatomy – in the scientific journal suggests that the structure of the woodpecker’s jawbones and head is such that the woodpecker can take blows like a boxer who keeps his chin down. The head doesn’t get to slouch.

Last year, on the other hand, it was discovered that all the important muscles of the darter’s body participate in the production of impact force. The woodpecker seems to tune in to the blow from the tip of the tail like a hammer, he said Finnish Nature.

Soon you can listen to the knocking and drumming of woodpeckers again. Our most common woodpecker, the pine woodpecker, digs a new nest hole for itself every spring.