Nate Rott

It sounds a bit counterproductive, but scientists have actually known for a while that it's a pretty useful behavior because it helps birds maintain the right amount of oil on their feathers, kind of like a dry shampoo, right?

You might do that, Elsa.

And it helps them get rid of parasites.

So, yeah, so that's what Yang really wanted to find out with this new study, which published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

And to do that, she ran an experiment where she collected sand and then a bunch of mite-covered chicken feathers from a farm on Taiwan.

I mean, you're welcome to try it out.

I mean, yeah, so to put it another way, what happened here?

I mean, basically what the birds are doing is sandblasting themselves.

That's Andrew Dickerson, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

And he was not involved in this new study, but he has researched the frequency at which dogs shake their body to rid themselves of water.

And he says the new paper backs up one of the things that he's found, that animals have some pretty finely tuned ways of getting rid of contaminants like mites or water, be it shaking off or agitating sand.

And maybe there's something that engineers and technologists can learn from those behaviors.

That is correct.

And as a surfer, this paper totally caught my eye because bull sharks have friends.

And get this also, Natasha can actually tell who's who just by like looking at their wounds or scars.

And sometimes just by the way they swim.

And as far as the shark social lives, the researchers saw some sharks consistently hang out with each other over the course of the study.

Like these perfectly named three pals.

Yeah, so in this study, Natasha says they looked at specific behaviors to see if sharks are making active choices about who to hang out with.

So that meant if they swam parallel to one another or if they changed direction to join or follow another shark.