Kurt Schwenk
speaker
52 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 29 May
Kurt Schwenk’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Working with her, it's so fun.
Since we evolved from fish ancestors and those ancestors fed in the water, that when eventually they transitioned to life on land, they needed to find a way to both capture food and manipulate it in the mouth that didn't involve water.
So in water, things like the prey are buoyant.
They'll float around in front of you.
There's no gravity to worry about.
And the vast majority of fish and even other aquatic vertebrates use suction.
So they actually rapidly expand their mouths and throats and they suck water in.
And anything like a small fish or prey item that's caught in that bubble of water that gets sucked in also comes into the mouth.
Yeah.
In fact, they make the mouth opening fairly small, which like a straw, it can accelerate the speed of the water into the mouth.
But by doing that, they're essentially exploiting these characteristics of water, which is the fact that it's viscous and that things in the water are buoyant.
But in the air on the land, the air is not viscous at all.
I mean, maybe you could suck a mosquito into your mouth, but not much else.
And there's gravity and the prey has weight, and so...
It has to be lifted and physically pulled into the mouth.
And so my feeling is that the tongue became elaborated from musculature that was already present in the fish to take the place of water.
Instead of suction, they protrude the tongue, capture prey on the tongue, draw it into the mouth.
And then once it's in the mouth, they can lift it and move it back and forth and push it into the throat to swallow.
Again, all the things that water did ancestrally.
You're listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service, the show that chews over your science questions.
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