IT’S an unusual way of eating, but some shorebirds use a gravity-defying trick to fill their stomachs. The same trick could also make them especially vulnerable to oil spills.
Shorebirds called phalaropes feed on copepods – small crustaceans – but no one knew exactly how they managed to eat them. The birds swim in circles to create a vortex that sweeps the copepods to the surface, then scissor their beaks open and shut to draw in food-filled beads of water. They look “like demented wind-up toys”, says Margaret Rubega at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, who first noticed the effect.
But…
