Protecting a piece of fruit-rich habitat is no easy task, but toucans have a few tricks up their sleeves. Although tropical rainforests may be the most fertile areas on earth, they are also rife with competition for food, mates and space.

In the tropical rainforest, competition is fierce. Protecting a piece of fruit-rich habitat is no easy task, but toucans have a few tricks up their sleeves.

Toucan family

The wonderful evolution

Although tropical rainforests may be the most fertile areas on earth, they are also rife with competition for food, mates and space. Every creature in the forest is trying to establish an advantage.

A thick-billed toucan (Ramphastos sulfuratus) bullies a brown-headed parrot (Pionopsitta haematotis)

Evolution - adaptation to the environment has given organisms a variety of characteristics that help them survive and reproduce for the next generation. Many secrets of survival are hidden from human view, or are too subtle for us to detect intuitively with the naked eye.

The toucan that lives in the Americas is not one of them.

One look at this level of enthusiasm and you know it's in Brazil

The beak of a toucan is beautiful to some people and hilarious to others. This kind of significance makes people can't help but think - what are the functions of bird's beak and ? And, how does it fly with such a huge mouth?

Optimal solution of strength and weight

In the toucan family, their "beak-to-body ratio" is the largest among all birds. There are more than 40 species of toucan, each flamboyantly showing off their oversized beaks, some of which are more than a third of their body length.

The length is more than one-third of its body length

This huge mouth that looks thick is actually very light and does not affect flight.

Scientists have carefully studied these colorful evolutionary miracles and found that the structure of the giant mouth is very clever - a thin keratin sheath on the outside, surrounding the bone fiber matrix, with a large number of gaps - this is an optimization force and weight combination.

%￥￥%@!

These powerful beaks are useful in the forest canopy, where toucans forage in large flocks for fruit, often competing with other species of birds. In a fight like this, there's no doubt who has the bigger mouth and who's more powerful - the toucan reigns supreme in the best picking spots.

In addition, the beak can penetrate deep into tree holes to obtain food that other birds cannot obtain, and it can also raid the nests built by smaller birds.

What’s very funny is that during the epidemic, Brazil’s “Dabai” dressed as a toucan to do nucleic acid tests for the public - the perfect endorsement for nucleic acid testing - thick, long, and deep holes...[cover Face]

hahahaha

Hidden Function

The large and long beak has obvious competitive advantages, and even children can guess that it can take advantage in fights. However, Big Mouth actually has additional secrets.

It wasn’t until more than a decade ago that scientists discovered a hidden function in the toucan’s beak. In 2009, during a infrared camera shooting process, it was accidentally discovered that the toucan's big mouth is covered with a network of blood vessels and can control the blood flow on its own.

热Ah

By changing the amount of blood flowing through these "outside" parts of the body, toucans are able to regulate their internal body temperature: when they are hot, the rate of blood flow increases, and their large beaks efficiently release excess heat outwards. This is a big advantage in the hot, humid tropics where they live.

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in Africa and Asia, without Toucan. hornbill occupies the ecological niche of toucan, and they are very distantly related. This is a classic example of convergent evolution . Simply put: canopy + fruit eating + fierce competition = big mouth.

It can be said that the emergence of these huge beaks on the earth confirms Hegel's classic sentence "the existence of is reasonable ".

Canopy layer + eating fruits + fierce competition = big mouth

After writing this, let me say a few more words: The true meaning of "existence is reasonable" is - everything that exists has its reason for its existence , everything that exists can find the reason for its existence.

The next time a scumbag uses "existence is reasonable" to justify his behavior, I will criticize him~

The author thanks you for your attention (¬_¬)