Cats drink using lap-and-gulp trick

[n2doc]

Imbibing a delicate interplay between inertia and gravity By Susan Milius Web edition : 2:08 pm


Sorry, Fido. A paper in the journal Science has just ascribed “elegance and complexity” to the way cats drink.

A dog drinks by forming its tongue into a little cup that merely ladles liquid into its mouth, says coauthor Pedro Reis of MIT. “Cats are much more sophisticated in the knowledge of fluid dynamics,” he deadpans.

Instead of scooping, cats use what the researchers describe as a “subtle mechanism” in which water sticks to the tip of the tongue and is pulled up into the mouth, taking advantage of the water’s inertia. Though cats have been lapping liquids in public for millennia and early high-speed photography showed some of the basic motions of their drinking, Reis says he knows of no detailed analysis of the phenomenon preceding the one he and his colleagues published online in Science November 11.

“It’s amazing how you look at something and think, somebody must have studied that before. But as happens with many things in everyday life, that is not the case,” Reis says. “That’s one of the excitements of science.”

The gaps in lapping analysis do not surprise functional morphologist Rebecca Z. German of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. “What we know about mammalian feeding is woefully incomplete,” she says. It’s hard to observe, and scientists have studied other feats such as locomotion in much more detail.

more
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/65379/description/Cats_drink_using_lap-and-gulp_trick

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Just heard about this on local public radio station...

[tridim]

2. If they were really smart they'd just use a glass.

[shraby]

3. I read some time ago that they make a little cup by curling

their tongue backward and "spoon" the liquid into their mouths. I think it was in Scientific American mag. or Discovery mag. over 10 years ago.

[txlibdem]

4. It doesn't matter how they drink - It's all about them sucking out your soul at night

That's the real danger with these familiars of the dark ones.
:hide::sarcasm::hide: