UH Hilo physicist asks: How do giraffes drink water?
Professor Philippe Binder was in Namibia’s Etosha National Park watching a giraffe drink water and he couldn’t stop thinking about the complexity of getting water up that long neck. Research soon commenced.
Physicist Philippe Binder from the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo is featured in the online magazine Inside Science about his “sheer, pure fun” research into the swallowing mechanism of giraffes.
The giraffe’s neck—useful for reaching the loftiest acacia leaves or for slugging would-be rivals—has its drawbacks. When the creature stoops to take a drink, for example, it must spread its front legs and lower its head to the water’s surface. How a giraffe, the tallest animal on earth, then propels that water up its long neck to reach its stomach has been a mystery. Now, new research suggests the secret may lie with a simple device known as a plunger pump.
The spark that kindled this insight struck Philippe Binder last year in Namibia’s Etosha National Park. He was sitting in a tour bus, watching a giraffe drink from a nearby watering hole.
“I thought, ‘Wow, this is weird. Getting water up that long neck can’t be easy,'” he said.
Binder is a physicist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, where he studies nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory and seldom encounters giraffes. But while on sabbatical at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, Binder couldn’t get the image of the thirsty giraffe out of his head.
“Physicists often have a childlike curiosity to know why things do what they do,” he said. “I just wanted to understand how giraffes drink. It was sheer, pure fun.”
He enlisted the help of Dale Taylor, a physicist at the University of Cape Town, and the two set about accumulating giraffe minutia—neck length, esophagus capacity, length of typical drinking episodes—and searching for possible mechanisms behind the behavior.
Read full story about the research at Inside Science.
Learn more about Prof. Binder’s research interests in nonlinear dynamics, statistical mechanics, complex systems, time series analysis, theory of computation, biologically-inspired physics, and information processing by nonlinear systems.
