You may know that duck doesn’t have teeth. It may true but not perfectly true. You might wonder how they can eat something strong while they don’t have teeth, right? All life creature starts to digest all their food is by mouth. Uniquely, not every life creature has same mouth. There is flat mouth, but also long and advanced mouth.
This multi shape of mouth makes the creature feel hard to eat something. For animal that doesn’t have arm, mouth is their main tool to put something. Both food and another thing can be hold by their mouth including caring something.
For duck that has long beak it may hard to understand how they can eat all this time. They’ll be so hard to take or hold their food on the beak, right? In the fact, that long beak can also help the duck to eating. By find some ways, their long beak isn’t big problem.
To make you understand how duck beak works, here is some ways of duck beak mechanism works during eat.
You must have seen a duck that just swam on the surface, right? Not only swimming, on the surface the ducks can search for food under water. By dipping their heads in the water, their beaks will start working like a radar that is ready to track food. The beak is also used to take water as their drink. Although ducks can only dive at certain depths, their beaks are powerful enough to work as radars in finding food. In this process other than using beaks, they also use their other limbs such as the eyes and feet to move in the water.
Just inside their beak there are small thing, tooth-like notches called lamellae. These lamellae are like zipper which is fine structures help ducks filter out water, mud and other items the duck doesn’t want to eat. The lamellae remove the undesirable thing from their mouth and leaving it only the intended food. A duck may have a few dozen to a few hundred lamellae, depending on the type of duck. The lamellae also help duck to grip the food.
Ducks may eat not just fish, but seeds, grains, plants, frogs, salamanders and crawfish whatever and how hard the food, the beak will allow. Although they swallow their food whole, ducks have some tools to help the digestion process. This tool called gizzard. Gizzard is like a muscle, an organ between a duck’s stomach and intestines. Food enters the gizzard from the stomach and tool like the muscular gizzard squeezes together, crushing food. Ducks also deliberately eat tiny stones called grit and inside their body it would store in the gizzard as an additional grinder. So unique, right.
This is interesting fact about duck beak. Even have a dozen or moreover a hundred lamellae, in the fact duck can’t chewing. They might look like chewing their food, but it is exactly digest and bring them to the gizzard. This is more like swallowing whole foods then the smoothing process occurs in the body, unlike humans whose process of refining food has begun when food is in the mouth. Softer foods may be broken up by something like ‘chewing’, but ducks aren’t chewing deliberately. So, the conclusion is their lamellae using to grab and lock something on their mouth, it is not too use for digest or smoothing the dish.
Those all ways that used by duck to digest their food. By all mentioned up stair, now we know that beak duck is really useful to help duck during eating. Even they are often something soft like concentrate, it doesn’t mean that their beak didn’t work well. Even consume soft dish, their beak still filtering which one they can eat and which one they can’t.
Many of you may be afraid of duck beaks because of the destructive power that they have, however, besides being a member of the body and a tool for eating, duck beaks are also use as protective tool when they feel threatened. Their beak may not be deadly but it is enough to make you hurt and let it go.