Tuesday 5 March 2013

Good Question 5

Good evening and welcome to Quiz Night Tuesday. Tonight's question is:

What do sea birds drink?

I will post all your answers and my answer at 8:30pm even though there is a big match on tonight!

And the answer (which loads of you got right) is sea water.

Sea birds have developed special salt secreting glands which are located above the eye. They get rid of the salt into nasal passages and the salty liquid drips from the beak. The gland removes salt really, really well. For example a gull given a tenth of it's body weight in sea water can secrete about 90% of the salt in 3 hours and thus allows seabirds to drink the water they live in.
Fact taken from Manual of Ornithology - Avian Structure & Function

7 comments:

  1. It certainly is a good question and one which I had never thought of but I assume it must be sea water...yuck! :-)

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  2. Seawater, they have a specially adapted salt gland in the nasal region that filters the salt out, hence the name tubenoses :-)

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  3. Liquid :D Well Fulmars get rid of excess salt out of their "tube nose" I don't know if that's related to them drinking salt water or not.

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  4. SEAWATER....sounds like I'm making fun of the question, but the answer is....SEAWATER.

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  5. Probably not milk or beer so my guess would be water :-)

    Cheers

    DaveyMan

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  6. I'm a bit too late Findlay but I'd have said sea water as well. Honest.

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  7. A bit late on this one Findlay... but the comment above made me smile.

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