Chicken head cams and the vestibular sensory system

What does space exploration, science and the Caturday morning video smiles share? BIRDS, of course!

Sorry to disappoint the science-phobes out there, but this Caturday morning video smile actually does relate to science in a vague way. In this video (which does not feature a cat acting like, well, a cat) we instead see a human (acting like, well, I'll leave that to your imagination) and a sweet, innocent owl, trussed up like a hotdog in a bun. The purpose? to demonstrate the remarkable head stability of an owl. In this video, we watch a geeky NASA scientist move an owl's body around a number of axes in space to show how effortlessly the bird stabilises its head.

This video was part of a research project into the vestibular sensory system of owls, conducted by NASA. This research was conducted back in the ice ages when NASA was still trying to figure out how to send humans into space without causing them too much trauma.

The vestibular system, located in the inner ear, is used by many vertebrates to maintain their sense of balance. It is comprised of three semi-circular canals that contain small "rocks", properly known as otoliths. Together, they provide information to the brain about the movement and location of one's head and body in space. [Pictured above right: human vestibular system, courtesy of the GNU Free Documentation License].

It works like this: the three semicircular canals sense rotational movements and the otoliths sense linear accelerations. This information is integrated by the brain and used to help control eye movements so we don't become dizzy and to help our postural muscles keep us upright.

As the video clearly demonstrates, owls are much better than humans at "knowing" where their head and body are located in space, and as the research found, owls also have a much larger vestibulosensory system with richer neural connections than do humans [doi:10.1016/0300-9629(72)90116-8]:

But owls aren't the only birds that have this "head-tracking" ability. This next video, and dozens more on YouTube, show that chickens also are remarkably adept at head-tracking (but not all chickens: apparently, silky chickens are head-tracking retards, possibly because the silky feather mutation also affects their brain wiring or the morphology of their inner ear):

Okay, so this is just another of the myriad ways that birds are really amazing and far superior to humans -- everyone knows that! But what good (to humans) is a bird's ability to stabilise its head? The YouTube community suggests designing a chicken head-cam: attaching a tiny video camera to a chicken's head to reduce shake and to improve stability. Here's one of a number of such videos, which includes side-by-side comparisons between a chicken head-cam, a human head-cam, and a human hand-cam:

What are your thoughts about this? I wouldn't dream of attaching a mini-cam to the head of one of my parrots, since I know -- without even conducting that particular experiment -- exactly what the outcome would be!

Having spent my young childhood with chickens, I am quite fond of them and I am attracted to the idea of having a chicken stabilised camera. But might it be a problem to walk around with one in a European city? (Although I did know a man in NYC who placed his pet chicken in a basket and took it for walks around the Upper West Side of Manhattan every day. But then, NYC is just so remarkable in so many ways, so I guess this is not really surprising).


Money KE, Correia MJ. (1972). The vestibular system of the owl. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A: Physiology 42:353-358. doi:10.1016/0300-9629(72)90116-8 [no, this paper is not free!]


twitter: @GrrlScientist
facebook: grrlscientist