How Do Woodpeckers Avoid Brain Damage?

[rynner2]

Here we go again!

Teen repellent is Ig Nobel winner ... This year's winners included: ...
Ornithology: Why woodpeckers do not get headaches, by Ivan Schwab and the late Philip RA May ...

 

[rynner2]

Another look:

Feedback 14 October 2006
NewScientist.com news service
The 2006 Ig Nobel prizes
... Banging your head against the wall might make a more pleasant sound if it didn't hurt so much. But that doesn't bother pileated woodpeckers - they can head bang up to 12,000 times a day without getting a headache. Explaining how this is possible earned the ornithology prize for the late Philip May of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Ivan Schwab of the University of California, Davis. May discovered that the bird had a thick skull made of spongy bone which held the contents tightly in place, just as styrofoam blocks keep objects from bouncing around inside boxes. "It's the bouncing that causes damage," Schwab explains. He believes woodpeckers evolved small brains to make them more resistant to impact, although we wonder if birds of little brain were merely the ones most likely to become head-bangers in the first place. ...

http://www.newscientist.com/backpage.ns ... 732.200_fb

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here are the research publications on which Schwab and May's IgNobel Prize was based:

REFERENCE: “Cure for a Headache,” Ivan R Schwab, British Journal of Ophthalmology, vol. 86, 2002, p. 843.
REFERENCE: “Woodpeckers and Head Injury,” Philip R.A. May, JoaquinM. Fuster, Paul Newman and Ada Hirschman, Lancet, vol. 307, no. 7957, February28, 1976, pp. 454-5.
REFERENCE: “Woodpeckers and Head Injury,” Philip R.A. May, JoaquinM. Fuster, Paul Newman and Ada Hirschman, Lancet, vol. 307, no. 7973, June 19,1976, pp. 1347-8.

SOURCE (With Videos): https://improbable.com/2014/10/28/dr-schwab-explains-why-woodpeckers-dont-get-headaches/

 

[EnolaGaia]

Everything old is new again ... This newly-published research takes a closer look at woodpeckers' hammering behavior from a structural / engineering point of view.

Why Don't Woodpeckers Get Brain Damage? Research Presents an Intriguing New Hypothesis

A new study on woodpecker biomechanics has cast doubt on speculations that the small chisel-headed bird avoids turning its brain to mush through fancy shock-absorbing adaptations.

Rather, its brain might simply be too tiny for it to care.

"By analyzing high-speed videos of three species of woodpeckers, we found that woodpeckers do not absorb the shock of the impact with the tree," says Sam Van Wassenbergh, a biomechanics researcher from the University of Antwerp in Belgium. ...

Snapping their heads back and forth an astonishing 20 times a second, members of some species can experience forces of up to 1400 g. Compare that with the paltry 90 to 100 g that can give a human concussion, and it's easy to imagine the kind of trauma that might arise inside that tiny skull.

Past research has pointed to a variety of body modifications that could help lessen the impact on the woodpecker's brain tissue, such as spongy, shock-absorbing bones and neck muscles.

While these features appear to be engineered to absorb a blow, proving that they successfully reduce the forces as the woodpecker's head accelerates and decelerates rapidly is a challenge.

There's also the question of whether woodpeckers even bother with safety features in the first place. Their small brains and tight skulls leave little room for rattling about.

In this study, using more than a hundred high-speed videos of six woodpeckers representing the species Dryocopus martius, Dryocopus pileatus, and Dendrocopos major, Van Wassenbergh and his team carefully measured the deceleration of their eyes as their beaks met wood.

Given the eyeball is a fairly suitable proxy for the squishy insides, the researchers could calculate the physics of a decelerating skull.

It turns out the whole head moves as one, with little variation in peak deceleration between the eye and the beak.

"Their heads basically function as stiff, solid hammers during pecking," says Van Wassenbergh. ...

https://www.sciencealert.com/new-re...-on-why-woodpeckers-don-t-suffer-brain-damage

 

[MercuryCrest]

"Rather, its brain might simply be too tiny for it to care."

Had I been drinking anything at the moment I read this, I might have shot it through my nose. Ah, beautiful, beautiful science.

 

[Sid]

Everything old is new again ... This newly-published research takes a closer look at woodpeckers' hammering behavior from a structural / engineering point of view.

https://www.sciencealert.com/new-re...-on-why-woodpeckers-don-t-suffer-brain-damage

Because they've got a shock absorbing spring.