“I’m used to studying things that walk or run, where you have to chase them across the force-plate or have them chase you,” says Chang. “The first question people ask is: How do they stand on one leg?” So he teamed up with Ting, an expert in postural control at Emory University, to find out.įirst, they went to Zoo Atlanta with a force-plate-a fancy 3-D bathroom scale that measures the forces a foot exerts in all directions. “When I take my kids to the zoo, the first thing you see is the flamingo exhibit,” says Chang, who’s based at Georgia Tech. You can pose a flamingo cadaver on one leg, and leave it there. And as Chang and Ting found, they can even keep balanced when dead. When they raise a leg, their body weight shifts in a way that naturally stabilizes the joints of their standing limb, so they can remain upright without any muscular activity. To maintain our balance, we constantly use our muscles to make tiny adjustments to our posture. Standing on one leg “is a challenging yoga posture, and a test of coordination that people use,” says Ting. “We weren’t expecting it to be stable, but it totally was.” And Chang probably looked like a fever-dream version of Mary Poppins, holding a dead flamingo aloft like the world’s unlikeliest umbrella. The flamingo looked almost like it was sleeping-one leg extended, the other bent, and the head tucked back into its feathers. And then Ting said: Why don’t you try and pick it up by the leg?Ĭhang grabbed the bird by its shin and held it upright-and the leg snapped into place, becoming rigid and unyielding. With the bird lying flat on their table, they tried moving its legs this way and that. But when they started dissecting one, they couldn’t find anything. He and a fellow biologist Lena Ting suspected that the pink birds might have features on their legs that help lock their joints in place. Young-Hui Chang can remember exactly when he realized how flamingos balance so effortlessly on one leg.
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