Why Don’t Woodpeckers Get Concussions?
Slamming a beak against the trunk of a tree would seem like an activity that would cause serious neck pain and concussion. Woodpeckers!! they can hammer a tree 20 times a second, 10,000 times a day, own the power to withstand more than 4000 g’s and they take less than a millisecond to move from full speed to stop. Their vigorous peck is like headbutting a tree at a full sprint. Wow, they sure are sturdy and salubrious!
It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end and that’s basically the inside of your head right before you get a concussion, i.e. An expeditious deceleration can cause your brain to hit the inside of your skull and vandalize the cells and when the nerves are damaged in the right area, you can lose consciousness. The enthralling fact is that you don’t have to be knocked out to get a concussion, even smaller impacts can have enduring damage like CTE, a disease caused by repeated impacts. When doctors did autopsies on professional football players they perceived those brains appearing to be wasted away from years that weren’t technically concussions. Millions of concussions have come across from young athletes not counting the brain injuries from other causes, which is a big hurdle.
Scientists are wondering if they can learn anything from a firm headed bird Woodpecker, the headbangers with spongy skull bones, possessing special eyelids that close just before the impact, but their anti-concussions secrets are mysterious.
Woodpeckers hammer to mark their territories and nests, but mostly to look for food. After they drill a hole, The facet is their tongue to be three times the length of its beak, like a spear to reach inside and draw out their food.
Hyoid, a bony buttress in a woodpecker that goes out back of its mouth, all the way around its skull, and ends up between its eye. It is anticipated that this bone and muscle wrapper may act like a seatbelt and absorb some of the shocks when a bird’s head decelerates. Acorn Woodpeckers drills 1000’s trees and hammer a seed into each one, a seatbelt tongue can’t be enough to keep them from headaches.
We know that force equals mass times acceleration/deceleration, but what matters for the injury is the amount of area that force has been subjected to. A woodpecker’s brain is oriented differently, so the force is distributed over a larger area of the brain so it doesn’t slosh as ours do. So It deduces that they are anti to concussion because of their tiny heads.
They do say, Smaller the detail bigger the value!
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