Your tongue helps you talk, taste and manipulate food in your mouth, but it doesn't help you much getting food to it. For some members of the animal kingdom, though, the tongue is a highly adapted muscle critical for life. Without it, some creatures couldn't eat even with food all around them. Various herbivores, carnivores and insectivores are among these. Their tongues vary in size, shape and range of motion, depending primarily on diet.
Long Misunderstood, Hummingbird Tongue Works Like Micropump
The slender hummingbird tongue has been misunderstood for more than years, a new study finds. Since , scientists thought that hummingbird tongues used capillary action — a phenomenon in which liquid flows through narrow areas, even working against gravity — to slurp up floral nectar. Researchers got this intriguing but wrong idea because the birds have long groves on their tongues that look like open cylinders, said Alejandro Rico-Guevara, lead researcher of the new study and a research associate of functional morphology at the University of Connecticut. But capillary action is slow, at least by hummingbird standards. Using high-speed videos, researchers in the new study determined that hummingbird tongues act as elastic micropumps, allowing the birds to feed at rapid speeds, Rico-Guevara said.
What would you do if you had the Guiness Book of World Records-certified longest tongue on the planet? Well, Monterey resident Nick Stoeberl lives that dream, and he's doing it right using his massive taster to make art. Clocking in at 3.
A Justified Trope in certain cases — say, a mutation or non-human anatomy — but in other cases this is left completely unexplained and usually Played for Laughs. The lucky person in possession of this tongue frequently has a surprising amount of control over it, and may even use it as a weapon. Characters without this feature may suddenly develop one , often in tandem with a Jaw Drop , when startled, screaming, or confronted with Hello, Nurse!