Ducks on a Treadmill

Today I stumbled across this article.

All because I now have a staff ID card. This ID card gives me free access to soem gym facilities, including a swimming pool. On the website search box I entered "swimming". This was the fourth result. I couldn't resist.

Heart rate and oxygen uptake in exercising eider ducks

Oh yeah.




Here's a photo of an Eider Duck. Because blog posts should have pictures*.


Take some ducklings, convince them that you're their Mother, feed them, love them, implant litttle scientific things in them, and ... teach them to use a treadmill.

Which gives us such informative snippets as:

• "Maximum sustainable running speeds ranged from 0.72 to 0.82ms-1 in all six ducks apart from duck 4**, who would not run at speeds above 0.6ms-1."
• "The ducks were trained to run on a variable-speed treadmill (Powerjog EV2, Sports Engineering)."

I'm in the wrong field. Someone get me a duck and a treadmill, I'm having a career change.


*I tried a google image search for "eider duck treadmill", strangely it didn't do much. Maybe I may have been the only person in a while to google that exact combination of words? Who knows. What have you googled today?
** Duck # 4, not the Usain Bolt of the waterfowl world.