rhamphotheca: Unidirectional airflow in the lungs of birds,…

rhamphotheca:

Unidirectional airflow in the lungs of birds, crocs…and now monitor lizards!?

by Matt Wedel

Today (12/11/13) sees the publication of a new paper by Emma Schachner and colleagues in Nature, documenting for the first time that unidirectional, flow-through breathing–previously only known in birds and crocodilians–happens in freakin’ monitor lizards. The image above, which is most of Figure 1, pretty much tells the tale.

Some quick background: until the early 1970s, no-one was quite sure how birds breathed. Everyone knew that birds breathe, and that the air sacs had something to do with it, and that the bird lungs are set up as a series of tubes instead of a big array of little sacs, like ours, but the airflow patterns had not been worked out.

Then in a series of nifty experiments, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen and his students and colleagues showed that birds have unidirectional airflow through their lungs on both inspiration and expiration. Amazingly, there are no anatomical valves in the lungs or air sacs, and the complex flow patterns are all generated by aerodynamic valving. For loads more information on this, including some cool animations, please see this page (the diagram below is modified from versions on that page).

For a short, eminently readable summary of how undirectional airflow in birds was first discovered (among many other fascinating things), I recommend Schmidt-Nielsen’s wonderful little book, How Animals Work…

(read more: Sauropod Vertebrate Picture of the Week)

images by Emma Schachner

Wow, dinosaurs must have had similar lungs…