Rather than working like a pair of scissors which have less grip the further the fish is held from the joint, puffin jaws are more manoeuvrable and can grip fish front to back with equal pressure. Given how much we hear about fish stocks being in decline, can they really have swooped into the water and snatched up half a shoal in their mouth? Sadly for the puffins, they have to work a bit harder than that, and it’s down to the design of their beaks that they can take home these mouthfuls. One puffin once carried 126 fish in their beak! Does a glowing beak help a puffin attract a mate? Can they see this perceived photo-luminescence? Is it simply an accidental by-product of the beak re-growing in the summer? Dunning and a team of scientists from around the globe are now deep in detective work to try to understand just why puffins are even cooler than we thought. The internet went into overdrive and everyone wanted to know the story behind this rave-ready adaptation. If you thought the puffins couldn’t get any more impressive, in January 2018, Nottingham University student Jamie Dunning posted a picture on Twitter which revealed that puffin beaks glow under UV light. Puffin parents can supply their young with fish more than 100 times a day. There, they hunt herring, hake, capelin, and sand eels, topping up their meals by drinking the salt water. They swim by flapping their wings as if flying through the water and use their feet to steer. ![]() When wintering out at sea puffins dive as deep as 60m. They look so different and are so rarely seen in winter that in the past any scientists who did see them tended to mistake them for a completely different species. In winter puffins also moult away their wing feathers, rendering them flightless. Gone are the colourful beak and the black mascara-like markings around the eyes which give them their sorrowful definition. Much like clowns removing their make-up at the end of a show, puffins shed their characteristic looks when the mating season finishes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |