If no freshwater is available, flamingos can use glands in their head that remove salt, draining it out from their nasal cavity. Special tough skin and scales on their legs prevent burns, and they can drink water at near boiling point to collect freshwater from springs and geysers at lake edges. Two of the lesser flamingo's preferred habitats, Lake Bogoria in Kenya and Lake Natron in Tanzania, are hypersaline and hostile to practically all other forms of life (Natron water can even strip away human skin).įor the flamingos this a bonus. The lesser flamingo, however, can consume enormous amounts with no ill effects (unless you count their colorful plumage, which comes from a pigment in the algae). These poisonous plants produce chemicals that, in most animals, can fatally damage cells, the nervous system, and the liver. Most are found in super-alkaline lakes throughout Africa's Great Rift Valley, which host immense blooms of microscopic blue-green algae (called cyanobacteria). One species, the lesser flamingo, has taken this relationship to the limit. Africa's most toxic lakes are a paradise for fearless flamingosĪll flamingo species have evolved to live in some of the planet's most extreme wetlands, like caustic "soda lakes", hypersaline lagoons or high-altitude salt flats.
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