Manta Rays aka the Devil Fish, is an elegant filter feeder that glides through the ocean with incredible grace and power while at the same time feeding on plankton and other tiny delicacies without the need to clear it's throat no matter how many goodies it gets during the day.
The car-size, kite-shaped fishes filter their plankton food from seawater, but they don’t pause, close their mouths and snort clogs from their filters nearly as often as you would expect, according to Misty Paig-Tran, a marine biologist and a professor at California State University, Fullerton. If their filters work like sieves, then they must get clogged over time, like all similar systems, from vacuum cleaners to your water-filter pitcher.
But Dr. Paig-Tran and her colleagues’ latest research, published Wednesday in Science Advances, shows that the manta ray is using a previously unknown method of filtration that causes particles to glide over its straining system, rather than go through it. It doesn’t need to clear its filters much because they’re rarely clogged.
Nature never disappoints, ever.
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