Posted on 11/13/2010 3:34:15 AM PST by SonOfDarkSkies
It has taken four highly qualified engineers and a bunch of integral equations to figure it out, but we now know how cats drink. The answer is: very elegantly, and not at all the way you might suppose.
Cats lap water so fast that the human eye cannot follow what is happening, which is why the trick had apparently escaped attention until now. With the use of high-speed photography, the neatness of the feline solution has been captured.
...
Writing in the Thursday issue of Science, the four engineers report that the cat’s lapping method depends on its instinctive ability to calculate the point at which gravitational force would overcome inertia and cause the water to fall.
What happens is that the cat darts its tongue, curving the upper side downward so that the tip lightly touches the surface of the water.
The tongue is then pulled upward at high speed, drawing a column of water behind it.
Just at the moment that gravity finally overcomes the rush of the water and starts to pull the column down — snap! The cat’s jaws have closed over the jet of water and swallowed it.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
This is extremely good information!
This is extremely good information!
Gets his shampoo and his drink in one shot. Is this cool or what?
The cats have you trained well.
Well, at least you now know how the Stimulus funds were spent.
BTW, I ran my own test without any Stimulus funding.
I keep two water bowls side by side on a tray in the corner of my den/office for my cats (this is their only source of water except for a slowly dripping tap and the toilet bowls). In one, I pour water from the faucet and in the other I pour only filtered water (Brita). I have 5 cats and they drink a lot of water collectively. Both bowls are changed and cleaned daily.
Results: The one with the faucet water never gets used...and the one with filtered water is almost always half-full each morning.
You can say that again!
LOL. Sorry about the double post.
LOL...that’s the feline version of charcoal filtering!
We once had one who would slink into the pool and swim across it. It would then quietly climb out and pounce on a bird at the feeder in the back yard.
We had to remove the bird feeder because the old woman next door kept calling the police every time Ali made a kill.
I have another now who took out three rats and a mole in one night. Left them all in a neat little pattern on the stoop.
Maincoon?
Leonardo da Vinci
My older cats go bat-crap crazy if we try to get them in the bathtub to hose them down with a shower head if they soil themselves. And yet that cat in the video has a look of absolute indifference (ecstasy?) as it lets the stream of water idly pour off the back of its left ear.
Go figure.
Cats are sneaky. Are we sure they didn’t set up these engineers? How many cats participated?
” “4 engineers with not a hell of a lot to do.”
“Well, at least you now know how the Stimulus funds were spent.” “
They were probably working diligently to ‘prove’ that cats (but only cats owned by humans) cause GW - and this was just a serendipitous side-discovery... ;)
BTW - my cat won’t touch bottled water — it’s tap water or nothing for him.... ;)
Geez. What part of "cats = predators, birds = prey" does she not understand?
What did she want you to do, kill the cat?
People trained by animals annoy me.
You did get me there tho.
Nothing like a warm cat turd between the toes in the morning to alter ones behavior.
I hate the little monsters, but I love the wife more.
Whatever... She was an insomniac or bird lover or something, 90+ years back then.
I removed the feeder because the police asked me to. They got sick of the daily 5am calls from spring to fall, year after year.
She is now passed. Same as the cat. He drowned in the pool after falling through thin winter ice.
Scratched the crap out of the liner trying to get out.
The project required no financing. The robot that mimicked the cat’s tongue was built for an experiment on the International Space Station, and the engineers simply borrowed it from a neighboring lab.
One of my cats, Coobs, has to ‘scoot’ the water bowl first, I guess to see if anything is in it (it’s a silver bowl so I guess it’s hard to tell for him), and then keeps his paw on the bowl the entire time while he’s drinking. He also likes to watch whenever the toilet flushes, he’ll put his front paws on the rim and watch everything go down with intense interest. My husband thinks he’s dumber than a Brick (also one of his nicknames) but I think he’s secretly a genius! ;)
All’s well that ends well. Pity it didn’t drown sooner
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