Can someone fact check this
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Why is the owl flying across the Atlantic?
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Owls don't weigh 16 pounds (except for fat owls). 300 kilowatts is a rate of energy, not a total quantity of energy. 300 kilowatt hours (which is possibly what they meant?) Is only around 260,000 kilocalories (which is called "calories" on food labels because units of measure were made up by humans). According to an extremely naive google search, that would only take an owl 5 years to consume, rather than 10. If the original number were correct, that would mean this owl eats 8,000 calories per day. Which is not typical.
Onto the broader point, the efficiency of birds in flight is not as simple as this image suggests. There is no (useful) formula that takes the weight of a bird and the distance it will fly and tells you how many calories that takes. Birds can fly at different elevations, at different speeds. They can fly with or against the wind. They can change many things about how they fly to be more efficient or less efficient.
If you really want to know how many calories it takes for an owl to cross the ocean, first get the owl to the point of starvation, then bring it on a boat to the middle of the ocean. Feed it a fixed number of Tootsie pops, then sink the boat. With nowhere else to land, the owl will be forced to fly to shore. Based on how far the owl makes it, you can determine how far each tootsie pop allowed it to fly, and derive calories per mile from that.
wrote last edited by [email protected]PLEASE DON'T starve the owl! There is another way: metabolism rate is proportional to the number of O₂ + hydrocarbons → CO₂ + H₂O reactions in the body, which can be measured as the amount of CO₂ created during respiration. For humans, the CO₂ concentration in exhaled air is close to constant, so by inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth into a bag (and not consciously hyper- or hypoventilating), one can get a very good measurement of one's metabolism rate in different scenarios (and the lag is seconds, not hours for nutrition!). This is obviously way more difficult to do with a flying owl (even in a wind tunnel) but perhaps a surgically inserted airflow meter could work, or a closed-loop wind tunnel with very precise measurement of O₂/CO₂ levels. Yes, a flying owl has CO₂ emissions, and so does a running human, but way less than a combustion engine.
Another idea is to measure the carbon and water emitted as weight loss (yes, you lose weight by breathing) but there are other factors that could skew the results such as sweat evaporation, skin shedding etc.
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That just means migration is a lie because otherwise you would see explosions
*owlplosions
it was right there yet you missed it
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Power is not a measure of work.
Tell that to my boss
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Now imagine that owl is carrying a coconut.
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Why is the owl flying across the Atlantic?
The Pacific is too far
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Now imagine that owl is carrying a coconut.
African or European coconut?
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The Pacific is too far
Probably the only correct answer.
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Tell that to my boss
Can I have their number or something I dont know how to contact them
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Tell that to my boss
My boss calls me a power bottom
