Just to add to your comment: calories in itself were a pretty good measurement for metabolic energy, because it is the energy needed to heat 1 gram of water by 1 °C, so something easily measurable to people at the time (roughly 100 years ago). The Joule was already proposed, but is less intuitive.
Comment on Can someone fact check this
prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Owls don’t weigh 16 pounds (except for fat owls). 300 kilowatts is a rate of energy, not a total quantity of energy. 300 kilowatt hours (which is possibly what they meant?) Is only around 260,000 kilocalories (which is called “calories” on food labels because units of measure were made up by humans). According to an extremely naive google search, that would only take an owl 5 years to consume, rather than 10. If the original number were correct, that would mean this owl eats 8,000 calories per day. Which is not typical.
Onto the broader point, the efficiency of birds in flight is not as simple as this image suggests. There is no (useful) formula that takes the weight of a bird and the distance it will fly and tells you how many calories that takes. Birds can fly at different elevations, at different speeds. They can fly with or against the wind. They can change many things about how they fly to be more efficient or less efficient.
If you really want to know how many calories it takes for an owl to cross the ocean, first get the owl to the point of starvation, then bring it on a boat to the middle of the ocean. Feed it a fixed number of Tootsie pops, then sink the boat. With nowhere else to land, the owl will be forced to fly to shore. Based on how far the owl makes it, you can determine how far each tootsie pop allowed it to fly, and derive calories per mile from that.
Wrufieotnak@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
PLEASE DON’T starve the owl! There is another way: metabolism rate is proportional to the number of O₂ + hydrocarbons → CO₂ + H₂O reactions in the body, which can be measured as the amount of CO₂ created during respiration. For humans, the CO₂ concentration in exhaled air is close to constant, so by inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth into a bag (and not consciously hyper- or hypoventilating), one can get a very good measurement of one’s metabolism rate in different scenarios (and the lag is seconds, not hours for nutrition!). This is obviously way more difficult to do with a flying owl (even in a wind tunnel) but perhaps a surgically inserted airflow meter could work.
three@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
No one ever looks at the community before replying anymore, huh?
faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Did we read the same comment?
three@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I don’t read comments I have to scroll 2 pages for, especially not in the shitposting community.
basxto@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
snowe@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
There are flying rates for owls, like the barn owl is 80 km/h. Flying from NA to Europe wouldn’t even take more than 100 hours (60 from Boston to Lisbon), so with that it would mean the bird would be spending 3kW of energy, which is just nonsensical.
All birds have a kJ/d amount, and even with a huge multiplier you wouldn’t come anywhere near the amount in the meme.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Who are thee, who is so wise in the ways of science?