There is a surprising physical explanation for why flamingos stand on one leg.

One of Earth's greatest wonders is the incredible variety of plant, fungal, and animal life that inhabits it. There are many things to marvel at in the world, whether you're on land, in the air, or at sea. Even though there is an overwhelming amount of variety among Earth's thriving organisms, we can learn about how each species fits into a specific ecological niche by analyzing how it has adapted its physiology and behavior.

The flamingo is one of the most unexpected creatures to be found in the wild. Physique-wise, they're definitely out of the ordinary. There aren't many animals that look like them because of their unusually long, skinny legs, bright pink coloring, long, flexible necks, and disproportionately large, hooked bills. However, the flamingo is most well-known for an unusual behavior: it is not uncommon to see these birds standing on one leg. An explanation can be found in science, but it has to do with physics and not biology.

Consider yourself a flamingo for a moment. Your safety necessitates that you travel in a group, or "flock." Because of your long, skinny legs, you can stand in water as deep as your legs are long without getting wet or cold. With each splash of your webbed feet, you can agitate the marine life living on the ocean floor. To supplement your diet of stirred-up algae, crustaceans, larvae, and small fish, your long, flexible neck and bizarre bill, in which the lower portion is longer and thicker than the upper portion, are perfect.

You'll always find a flamingo with both feet in the water when it's actively feeding, whether that means stirring the water or sticking its head down to the bottom to search for small, tasty morsels. Flamingos, in contrast to diving feeders like ducks, always feed with both feet firmly planted on the ground, regardless of their location.

Some rather elementary science can account for many of the biological and behavioral characteristics we attribute to the flamingo that we otherwise cannot explain.

• Having long legs and a long neck go hand in hand in flamingos because evolution selects for animals that can successfully feed in varying depths of water without getting their entire bodies wet. Feeding by muddying the water and then digging with their beaks is a survival skill for flamingos when food in the shallows is scarce.
• The crustaceans and algae that make up the bulk of a flamingo's diet provide them with the carotenoid pigments that give the birds their distinctive pink to red color. Whiter, less colorful flamingos result from a lack of the pigment in their diet.

Flamingos are rarely seen out of the water, even when they aren't feeding. Because of their high degree of sociality, flamingos tend to flock together when one of them makes a move toward the water. Because flamingos are such strong swimmers, they can easily travel across any body of water to reach land where they can perch and feed.

Hundreds or even thousands of flamingos will perform complex choreographed displays that include head-flapping, wing-salutes, twist preens, and even marching in unison. Additionally, flamingos spend a lot of time preening, a behavior in which oil secreted from the base of the tail is distributed throughout the feathers. (Flamingos can spend up to three times as much time preening as other waterfowl. Even when bathing in the shallow freshwater in which they almost exclusively engage, they completely submerge their bodies.

A flamingo in a swimming pool may look like it's in terrible danger to an untrained eye. After all, despite the flamingo spending the vast majority of its life in the water, sightings are extremely uncommon:

• swimming,
• walking,
• adding confusion,
• feeding by submerging its beak,
• in a self-washing apparatus

Instead, flamingos are more likely to be found doing what they are most famous for, whether they are in the water or on land: standing on one leg with the other tucked tightly against its feathered body.

You're probably confused by this, and you wouldn't be alone. Given the flamingo's many unique biological and behavioral adaptations, you might be confused as to why an animal would choose to stand on one leg rather than two.

However, this is not due to genetics but rather physics. Getting into a pool on a hot summer day is a great example of the science of thermodynamics and heat transfer, and you've probably noticed this effect for yourself. All mammals and birds, including flamingos, are warm-blooded, meaning their core body temperature is always higher than the ambient temperature, no matter how cold it gets outside.

If you are a typical human with a temperature of about 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit), If you, at a certain temperature (say, 6 °F), were to stand naked in the open air, your body heat would be lost to the environment at a certain rate. Since the flamingo's body temperature is about 42 degrees Celsius (106 degrees Fahrenheit) — a degree higher than the average human's — the flamingo will lose heat more quickly than a human would because the difference between its temperature and the air around it is larger in the case of the flamingo.

If you were to submerge your entire body in water instead of air, you would lose heat at a rate 25 times faster than in air, even if the air and water were the same temperature. Ultimately, the rate at which heat is dissipated from a hot source into a cold environment is determined by the magnitude of the temperature difference between the two, the size of the area of contact between the source and the environment, and the efficiency of heat transfer.

If a person were to put one foot in a body of water up to the ankle, they would be submerging about 4% of their total surface area. The rate of heat transfer between a human body and air is slower than that between a human body and a If the water and air are the same temperature, you will lose the same amount of heat through your submerged foot as you would through the rest of your body.

What if, instead, you were a flamingo? When a flamingo is standing in the water on two legs, its body heat can be lost much more quickly than if it were standing on dry land alone due to the enormous surface area of its webbed feet.

However, if a flamingo can learn to stand on one leg instead of two while swimming, it can greatly improve its ability to retain body heat.

A flamingo with two legs in the water will lose between 140 and 170 percent more body heat than an identical flamingo standing on one leg in the water. The flamingo that succeeds in learning the preferred behavior—standing on one leg—has more time to spend in the water, where it can feed, groom, explore, and so on.

Simply put, a flamingo that masters the art of standing on one leg has a greater chance of survival and further evolution than its two-legged counterparts. Flamingos may not be able to differentiate between the importance of standing on one leg in the water and in the air; instead, it appears to be a behavior that flamingos engage in regardless of their environment. And, as far as science can tell, standing on one leg isn't a genetic trait but rather something learned from an early age and instilled in her young by the flamingo mother.

It seems that the flamingo's success is not hindered by the fact that they spend a lot of time standing on one leg, even when doing so isn't optimal (on dry land). The 'advantageous' behavior of standing on one leg only provides an advantage while in the water, illustrating how behavioral adaptations are often clumsy, inelegant solutions in biology. However, maybe the flamingo's balancing act on land is more beneficial than we think; maybe this is the ideal behavior.

The fact that the physics that governs the biology of every warm-blooded animal can help us make sense of certain aspects of behavioral ecology is a spectacular aspect of our reality. Although genetics play a huge role in shaping evolution, learned behaviors can prove decisive at times. Flamingos' peculiar one-legged stance defies all attempts at genetic explanation. For that You can get back to your house using only physics.