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One of the multiple, What the heck was this about? old-timey newspaper articles that commonly circulates via social media postings is the infamous DUCK EATS YEAST, QUACKS, EXPLODES; MAN LOSES EYE report about an Iowa man who supposedly lost the sight in one eye when his prize-winning duck named Rhadamanthus (after the mythical king of Crete) consumed a pan of yeast and exploded, presumably from the excessive build-up of gas in its innards: This account did in fact run in dozens of newspapers across the U.S. in January 1910, with slight variations in dating and wording: As to the usual follow-up question of Is this true?, our attempts to track down any additional information about the plight of Rhadamanthus and Silas Perkins more than a century after the fact have not proved fruitful. We can say, however, that this account appears to fall into the category of extremely implausible tall tales, one that echoes multiple urban legends about birds allegedly exploding due to their consuming substances that expand in volume after ingestion -- the most common expressions being the legends that seagulls will gruesomely and fatally burst if fed Alka-Seltzer (due to the resulting build-up of gas in their stomachs), or that birds often die after eating rice commonly thrown at newly-married couples at the end of wedding ceremonies (because the birds purportedly cannot digest the grains, which swell from moisture inside their stomachs and cause fatal raptures). These mistaken beliefs about exploding birds are not grounded in science, but they persist nonetheless. Why? They seem to be based on the assumption that birds cannot, to put it colloquially, vomit, burp, or fart, therefore they have no way of expelling substances that pose an immediate danger to them from their crops or stomachs (other than through the normal digestive and excretory processes, which work too slowly). What is the basis for these false assumptions, though? Most of us have noticed how birds often tilt their heads upwards while eating or drinking. This behavior reflects that birds don't generally swallow food and water the same way humans do -- they lack the mechanism for peristalsis (contractions occurring in the esophagus which propel food toward the stomach) and instead have to rely on gravity to move food from their mouths to their crops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnz7hW6BPXUSince birds lack the mechanism for swallowing without the aid of gravity, people reason, neither can birds perform the opposite of swallowing -- that is, vomiting -- without the aid of gravity. But since gravity only works in one direction (down, not up), hapless birds are stuck with whatever they swallow and cannot quickly get rid of it. But in fact, birds can both regurgitate and vomit material from their crops and stomachs -- indeed, the process of regurgitating food is often employed by birds in feeding their young.Whether birds can burp is less certain but still plausible: As for the other fowl end, birds may not fart the way we think of it, but that's generally because they don't need to rather than because they're not capable of it: And the reason birds don't need to fart is because they pass gas before it builds up to the point of becoming a fart: Or, to summarize those two currents of thought: The only other report of an exploding duck we were able to turn up that did not literally involve the use of explosives was a 1975 UPI report that attributed the mishap to alcohol -- applied externally, rather than consumed by the bird: All that considered, we have to say that if Silas Perkins did lose a prize-winning duck and/or the sight in one of his eyes back in 1910, we suspect that neither event had anything to do with an explosion caused by a pan of yeast.
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