For Friday’s catblogging, here are stories and videos about how cats drink. At Wired, Lisa Grossman writes that High-Speed Video Reveals Cats’ Secret Tongue Skills:
High-speed videos reveal the strange technique and delicate balance of physical forces cats use to lap milk from a bowl.
Unlike dogs, who use their tongues as ladles to scoop water into their jaws, cats pull columns of liquid up to their mouths using only the very tips of their tongues.
“Cats are just smarter than dogs from the point of view of fluid mechanics,” said civil engineer Roman Stocker of MIT.
At Ars Technica, in a post entitled Cats use gravity, inertia, gecko-like process to lap up cream, Casey Johnston elaborates on the technique:
….they get water into their mouths using an almost gecko-like process: their tongue tips shoot out, contact the water surface, adhere to it, and pull up to draw the water into a column that moves into their mouths thanks to sheer inertia. Cats then take advantage of their head orientation and gravity to hold that water in a cavity in their palate, just behind their front teeth. They swallow after somewhere between three and 17 laps.
According to the researchers, it’s the cats’ lack of cheeks, and the resulting inability to create suction, that restricts them to lapping. Still, cats have managed to adapt pretty admirably, and the authors note that further study of their tongues could be helpful in developing robots with flexible parts and biomechanical models for understanding the behavior of soft tissues.
See, also, How Cats Lap: Water Uptake by Felis catus.
Note that following the same principle, larger cats like cheetahs lap more slowly: