Back in 1940, an engineer at MIT filmed a cat lapping up liquid and deduced that the curving motion of a cat's tongue was the key, and it's essentially turning it into a spoon. Well, stop holding your breath, folks! The real way cats drink is now known, and it's actually quite interesting.
We've always figured that the top of a cat's tongue touches a liquid first when it's drinking, but what happens after that is too fast for the human eye to catch. So how do we study it? By using high-speed video cameras, of course!
Turns out there's no spoon action at all, MIT — now enlisting the help of Princeton University — observed. Instead, the rapid movement of the cat's tongue actually sends the liquid shooting up in a column and into the feline's mouth. The cat doesn't even get its chin wet in the process.
According to the researchers, it's all quite precise and a cat "instinctively knows just how quickly to lap in order to balance these two forces, and just when to close its mouth. If it waits another fraction of a second, the force of gravity will overtake inertia, causing the column to break, the liquid to fall back into the bowl, and the cat's tongue to come up empty." A fast feline can get in four laps every second, with each swipe of the tongue bringing in 0.1 milliliters of fluid.
Check it out for yourself in the video below. If you're super interested in this, by the way, some excellent supplemental reading can be found over at Ed Yong's blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science.
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