You can’t fact check something that doesn’t provide any of its work. Where did they get those numbers from? What equations did they use, and do they actually apply to this situation? Is the owl flying through a vacuum, through air, through honey? In reality, it would be flying through air, but we have no idea what the equation says it’s flying through, or even if it is flying. Maybe the equation is for cars traveling on a road.
Since it’s non-falsifiable, you can just disregard it. Claims require evidence, not assertions.
For starters, the average owl doesn’t weigh 16 pounds, that’s immediately proven false with a simple Google search. The smallest is an ounce, the largest just over 9 pounds.
On top of that, I can’t find any species that migrates from Europe to America…
So false from the jump.
There’s a few hundred that migrate from eastern NA to Europe and Africa, but no owls. Owls don’t really migrate at all. I did all the calculations in a different comment in this thread and the shitpost is so off it’s incredibly easy to disprove.
https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/a/15688 https://datazone.birdlife.org/flyway/factsheet/east-atlantic
Yeah, I should have specified, any species of owl that migrates from Europe to America… Not sure what that image is on about. Everything seems wrong.
The problem is not just that the numbers are made up, they are in the wrong units. Watts is not a unit of energy.
It’s like saying; a cow wants to eat an apple. Each apple weighs five liters. Therefore the cow would need a mouth 2 kg across. It would take the cow seven metres to eat the apple.
It is falsifiable, just from a basic bird standpoint. Energy usage and flight speed is listed on allaboutbirds.org and you can calculate the rest just from knowing how birds work (for one, owls don’t really migrate at all, though there are of course exceptions with everything in bird world).
But you don’t know if the equation they used was for if the owl is swimming through the deep ocean. That would take a lot of calories.
All these people in the comments be acting like owls are real when you can easily see how fake the are when you buy them in Home Depot’s gardening department.
What’s that in horsepower?
About 540
1 owlpower is roughly 0.37 horsepower
And it’s not even carrying a coconut
In Europe? The coconut’s tropical!
It could grab it by the husk!
What if it takes a boat?
Why would the owls be migrating East/ West? So e they just go north/ south?
Owls expel pellets. E = mc^2. By expelling pellets made of matter, owls gain energy that they then use in migratory flight.
Biggest owl weighs up to 10 lbs. (Blakiston’s Fish Owl)
300kW has dimension J/s and calorie has dimension J. It’s like saying that you would walk 5km/h equivalent of over 200m.
I will not entertain the notion that they were sloppy with what units they used.
Power is not a measure of work.
Tell that to my boss
My boss calls me a power bottom
Can I have their number or something I dont know how to contact them
But they recharge on power lines, that’s just science.
They do not … owls are solar powered, that’s why they are nocturnal… DUH.
Owls don’t weigh 16 pounds (except for fat owls). 300 kilowatts is a rate of energy, not a total quantity of energy. 300 kilowatt hours (which is possibly what they meant?) Is only around 260,000 kilocalories (which is called “calories” on food labels because units of measure were made up by humans). According to an extremely naive google search, that would only take an owl 5 years to consume, rather than 10. If the original number were correct, that would mean this owl eats 8,000 calories per day. Which is not typical.
Onto the broader point, the efficiency of birds in flight is not as simple as this image suggests. There is no (useful) formula that takes the weight of a bird and the distance it will fly and tells you how many calories that takes. Birds can fly at different elevations, at different speeds. They can fly with or against the wind. They can change many things about how they fly to be more efficient or less efficient.
If you really want to know how many calories it takes for an owl to cross the ocean, first get the owl to the point of starvation, then bring it on a boat to the middle of the ocean. Feed it a fixed number of Tootsie pops, then sink the boat. With nowhere else to land, the owl will be forced to fly to shore. Based on how far the owl makes it, you can determine how far each tootsie pop allowed it to fly, and derive calories per mile from that.
No one ever looks at the community before replying anymore, huh?
It’s hard to not answer, even if you know it.
Did we read the same comment?
I don’t read comments I have to scroll 2 pages for, especially in the shitposting community.
There are flying rates for owls, like the barn owl is 80 km/h. Flying from NA to Europe wouldn’t even take more than 100 hours (60 from Boston to Lisbon), so with that it would mean the bird would be spending 3kW of energy, which is just nonsensical.
All birds have a kJ/d amount, and even with a huge multiplier you wouldn’t come anywhere near the amount in the meme.
Who are thee, who is so wise in the ways of science?
Most of them are stealthy enough to stowl away on a boat though.
Prager u science books for the Shitler youth be like…
An owl emitting 300 kilowatts of power would explode in a ball of flame that would light up the neighbourhood. I’ve never seen this happen, so I do have doubts about the numbers given here.
That just means migration is a lie because otherwise you would see explosions
*owlplosions it was right there yet you missed it :(
Why is the owl flying across the Atlantic?
The Pacific is too far
Probably the only correct answer.
