Carlos Alcaraz, with his “grunts”, even aroused the complaints of his opponent Stefanos Tsitsipas, who complained about the sounds to the referee in a match at Roland Garros. However, Alzaraz is not the only one: the habit of tennis players of moaning or screaming when they hit the ball is called “grunting”. Now it has been discovered that the downy woodpecker, widespread in North America, also does something similar: it exhales in synchrony with the blows given with the beak on the wood, as Nicholas Antonson of Brown University (USA) and colleagues have seen. An in-depth study is dedicated to their study Evidence Network No. 399.
MUSCLES AND BREATHS. The researchers saw that these woodpeckers can drill wood using their entire body as if it were a hammer, contracting their muscles, and synchronizing their exhalations with the blows. The theory is that this leads to better contraction of the muscles and helps provide more strength. “We used a technique called electromyography, which is used in medicine and to evaluate athletic performance: essentially, it uses sensors to record the electrical activity of the muscles as they receive the signal to contract from the brain,” explains Antonson. “Furthermore, we recorded the contraction and expansion activity of their airways as air passed through them.”