Bar Headed Goose but with feet on the ground. |
| Image Diliff – Creative Commons, Wikipedia |
Extreme
sports seem to have a growing fascination for our fellow humans. As I’m getting
in training for an event of extreme couch potatoing starting next month with my
Olympic program pinned up on the wall, I have a limited interest in high flyers
at low oxygen levels. But, of course, it takes all sorts of interests to make
good news reading.
The
latest on extreme sports is Victoria Gill's piece for BBC Nature reporting on
Meir’s work at UBC on the bar headed geese who are natural high flyers (1). It’s
not surprising as the live up on the Tibetan Plateau so it’s just a hop, skip
and a flip to Everest.
The
question of the moment in this Olympic year, is how high can these high flyers
fly? No experimental biologist is going to be stumped with that one, especially
as UBC’s engineering department has a wind tunnel and if you toss a goose in a wind
tunnel it must do what a goose has to do and spread its wings and fly.
The
problem then becomes how little oxygen can it cope with and still fly? Those
chest muscles, which make delicious eating when roasted, require a lot of
oxygen to keep those wings functioning. The answer was to hatch out goslings
and train them to wear facemasks that could be connected up to an oxygen line.
They
regularly migrate through the Himalayas and hit heights of up to 20,000 feet
where the oxygen level in the atmosphere is about 50% of the sea level value
and these high flyers managed to cope with 33% of sea-level oxygen levels which
would mean that they could fly over the top of Everest should they wish.
So
those breast muscles with an extreme oxygen demand are still working fine, we
would like to know how they manage it. An unanswered question with the wind
tunnel though is what about the low air temperatures? The video appeared to be at normal
temperatures (1). Maybe this question is on the next grant proposal.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18641726
