NICHOLAS WADE
Cats lap water so fast that the human eye cannot follow what is happening, which is why the trick had apparently escaped attention until now. With the use of high-speed photography, the neatness of the feline solution has been captured.
The act of drinking may seem like no big deal for anyone who can fully close his mouth to create suction, as people can. But the various species that cannot do so — and that includes most adult carnivores — must resort to some other mechanism.
Dog owners are familiar with the unseemly lapping noises that ensue when their thirsty pet meets a bowl of water. The dog is thrusting its tongue into the water, forming a crude cup with it and hauling the liquid back into the muzzle.
Cats, both big and little, are so much classier, according to new research by Pedro M. Reis and Roman Stocker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined by Sunghwan Jung of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Jeffrey M. Aristoff of Princeton. ...
What happens is that the cat darts its tongue, curving the upper side downward so that the tip lightly touches the surface of the water.
The tongue is then pulled upward at high speed, drawing a column of water behind it.
Just at the moment that gravity finally overcomes the rush of the water and starts to pull the column down — snap! The cat’s jaws have closed over the jet of water and swallowed it.
The cat laps four times a second — too fast for the human eye to see anything but a blur — and its tongue moves at a speed of one meter per second. ...
via Cats Lap With Just Tip of the Tongue, Engineers Find - NYTimes.com.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Cats Lap With Just Tip of the Tongue, Engineers Find
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Yes, we once were the proud owners of a 40lb, monstrous tabby cat. He was the dominate critter of areas he roamed at night. Once he brought home a huge rat! He plopped it down in his feed dish and waited for us to see him eat the whole thing with the tail going down last. He also once brought home a young raccoon, and ate it!
But, then, something terrible must have happened in one his nocturnal rendezvous, because he came home one day without his tail!
From then on, we called him the "Uncola" - cola from the Spanish meaning tail.
Despite his toughness and meanness, we also noticed how he so delicately laps up milk - like a tiny little spoon at the tip of his tongue.
Still, I hate cats. Verminous creatures of night, is all they are.
Oops! I inadvertently exaggerated a bit on the weight of my uncola cat. I got the decimal point in the wrong place and used "lbs." instead of kilograms. But, it was still a monstrosity, in more ways than one.
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