The sleeping flyer

The truth is that the idea of ​​catching an albatross to travel to Australia could not be more accurate. By satellites it has been discovered, for example, that some albatrosses go around the world in less than two months and that they can plan for 6 days without flapping their wings.

-This is possible because the large wings of the wandering albatross (3.35 meters in span) use very little muscular energy to keep it extended due to the "shoulder block", a special tendon that keeps in place.

• A difference of the birds of prey, the albatross does not use the thermal currents to plan but the push of the wind generated by the waves of the sea. For that reason, the most energetic part of the albatross flight is the only occasion when it needs to flap its wings with force, like discovering the eyes of the scene that refers to the rescuers in Kangaroo. Once in the air, the young wandering albatross and there is no landing again until it is ready to breed: something that can happen 10 years later.

You heard correctly, 10 years in the air. As George Clooney is In the air.

How is this possible? When do they sleep? When does it come if there are no flight hostesses? The albatross sleep while they fly, because their two halves of the brain do it in turns. At the time of eating, fish food, squid and krill, sea diving in the sea or hunting on the surface.

That's why it's not as strange as the albatrosses. For these long trips, food and oil concentrated in proteins are stored in the stomach. As if they were jars with no expiration date for breeding.

• And is that the albatross have a sense of the family very accused, and not only the efforts at the time of taking care of the young. The albatross star in stories of love that could fit perfectly into one of the subplots of Love Actually or Stories of Valentine.

When courting, for example, it is done through elaborate documents in which the peaks collide. Dances that can take up to 10 years to learn while watching their elders execute. When at last you have a partner, life forever and a unique body language that is used to greet after spending a lot of time apart.

-The life expectancy of an albatross can reach up to 60 years. But breed at such a slow pace that there is a great risk that the species will be extinct in the next century. Its main threat is longline fishing: more than 100,000 albatrosses are trapped each year in the bait used to hunt tuna. Albatross who will not greet their wives again. Biological aircraft capable of going around the world that will no longer cross the sky.