This is what Professor John Cleese (Cornell University) had to say about albatrosses in 1970 * But Professor Cleese is by no means the only academic to have taken a keen interest in the enigmatic birds. Many have pondered the question of how wandering albatrosses spends weeks, even months, at sea without ever returning to […]
Tag: flapping
The role of flapping elephant ears in heat dissipation
Elephants are big, and they get hot. Especially in Africa. Thus, from the elephant’s point of view, there’s sometimes an urgent necessity to dissipate excess heat. Some investigators have suggested that flapping their large ears (strictly, their ‘pinnae’) could provide a significant heat-loss mechanism. (e.g. Buss, I. O., and Estes, J. A., 1971, ‘The Functional […]