http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/11/cats-tongues-employ-tricky-physi.html?ref=hpCats like to do things their own way—even, it seems, when it comes to drinking. Researchers have discovered that felines have their own style of lapping water. Their tongues perform a complex maneuver that pits gravity versus inertia in a delicate balance.
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On their own time,
Stocker (biophysicist at MIT) and a small crew of his colleagues filmed Cutta Cutta (his cat)—and eventually nine more cats from a local shelter—with a high-speed camera. They found that, as opposed to dogs, cats rest the tips of their tongues on the liquid's surface without penetrating it. The water sticks to the cat's tongue and is pulled upward as the cat draws its tongue into its mouth. When the cat closes its mouth, it breaks the liquid column but still keeps its chin and whiskers dry.
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They realized that feline lapping balances the liquid's inertia, its tendency to keep moving upward as the cat draws its tongue in, against the pull of gravity, which drags the liquid back down into the bowl. To get a satisfying drink, the cat must lap faster than gravity can overtake inertia. Good timing gives the cat the biggest drink, because the column of water is at its longest and thickest right before gravity wins out and pulls it down, the team reports online today in Science.
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So far, this drinking behavior has been seen only in felines, but robots could soon join their ranks. Hillel Chiel, a neurobiologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who works to develop "soft" robots that mimic natural behavior, says feline lapping could give robotics experts a new way to approach problems that require delicate handling of liquids, such as oil cleanups. "I think this study will definitely have an impact." Chiel says he's now "sort of sorry" he doesn't own cats. "I think I'd like to watch them lap."
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