Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs

Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by Isamu on Friday May 25, 2018 @02:01PM (#17156318)

I never understood the evolutionary push to develop flight, because I thought of it as an expensive form of transport.

Until this graph, which shows the cost of transport to actually favor flight over terrestrial locomotion.

http://www.wprize.org/images/TuckerCostGraph.gif

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Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by xerxes777 on Friday May 25, 2018 @08:29PM (#17159322)

Better quality: https://i.imgur.com/bBJTGyE.png

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Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by balsam on Friday May 25, 2018 @09:46PM (#17159650)

Omg horses are more efficient than most cars...?!?!

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Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by erikpukinskis on Saturday May 26, 2018 @02:17AM (#17160516)

And yet artificial meat being cheaper than animal meat is “inevitable” due to “optimization”.

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Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by yay_cloud2 on Friday May 25, 2018 @07:45PM (#17159116)

Can someone help me understand how to read/interpret this graph? I tried to make sense of it, but I think I was only fooling myself. I need to get planed.

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Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by vanderZwan on Friday May 25, 2018 @07:57PM (#17159177)

The lower on the graph, the more energy efficient. The further right on the graph, the heavier the object.

So the trend is towards more efficiency per kilogram for heavier animals, presumably due to square-cube law[0]. Or maybe the 3/4 scaling law[1][2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law

[1] http://mathbench.umd.edu/modules/misc_scaling/page20.htm

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFFVSvAr7Wc

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Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by reubenswartz on Friday May 25, 2018 @02:28PM (#17156566)

Also very handy for avoiding predators.

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Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by cletus on Friday May 25, 2018 @03:14PM (#17156965)

Also pretty handy for being a predator (or scavenger).

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Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by soared on Friday May 25, 2018 @03:23PM (#17157022)

Any other info or a higher res for that graph? That totally goes against what I would've assumed! (Trains are wildly inefficient?! Swimming is more efficient than flying or running?)

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Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by mjmahone17 on Friday May 25, 2018 @03:40PM (#17157178)

I think you’re reading that wrong. Trains are nearly the lowest energy/kg per unit distance travelled, as they’re in the bottom of the graph. Though it’s a bit weird for the x axis to be mass, too.

Basically the y axis is a measure of efficiency. The x axis just spreads out the points so you can compare things of similar mass.

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Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by soared on Friday May 25, 2018 @04:31PM (#17157663)

Oh I was reading it wrong, thank you. Its hard to see on mobile. Glad to hear trains are efficient again though.

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Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by saagarjha on Friday May 25, 2018 @03:32PM (#17157102)

If you have fins and are streamlined like a fish, I'd assume it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to move.

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Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by dluan on Friday May 25, 2018 @03:32PM (#17157096)

I like to think of flight as an artifact of nice pleasant gusts of wind on this particular planet.

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Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by natch on Saturday May 26, 2018 @12:41PM (#17162921)

I'd like to see where the Voyager spacecraft fits on that.

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Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by ouid on Saturday May 26, 2018 @12:56PM (#17163007)

were you just unaware of how far migratory birds travel?

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