That’s why the way cats lap is so perfect

A study conducted by MIT has shown that even the process of drinking water is ideal in the case of cats. Does this surprise anyone?

Physics explains how cats drink.

Physics explains how cats drink

As cats drink, even scientists bow their heads in awe. Admirers of cats – because they do have admirers – greatly appreciate the grace and effortless, acrobatic elegance that felines exhibit in motion. However, in our wildest dreams, we never suspected that these qualities also apply to how they consume liquids.

During their analysis, researchers discovered that domestic cats and big cats exploit a balance between two physical forces. When our beloved pets lap up, they extend their tongue straight downward toward the bowl. With the tip of the tongue curving backward so that the tongue’s end touches the liquid first. This insight came from a 1940 film featuring a cat lapping up milk, created by Harold “Doc” Edgerton, an electrical engineering professor at MIT. He was the first to use strobe lighting in photography to freeze the action.

However, high-speed videos created by researchers from MIT, Virginia Tech, and Princeton reveal that the top of the cat’s tongue is the only surface that touches the liquid. Unlike dogs, they don’t submerge their tongues into the liquid; their mechanism is much more sophisticated. The tip of the tongue barely touches the liquid’s surface before the cat retracts it. During this process, a liquid column forms between the moving tongue and the liquid’s surface. The cat then closes its mouth, snipping off the top of the liquid column while keeping its chin dry.

This is exactly how the process works

When the cat’s tongue touches the liquid’s surface, a portion of the liquid adheres through adhesion. However, the cat quickly retracts its tongue, and for a fraction of a second, inertia – the tendency of the moving liquid to continue following the tongue – overcomes gravity, which pulls the liquid back toward the bowl. The cat instinctively knows when this delicate balance changes and closes its mouth before gravity catches up with inertia. If the cat gets distracted, the liquid column breaks, and the liquid falls back into the bowl.

While a domestic cat makes about four “laps” per second on average, big cats know they need to slow down. Since their tongues are larger, they must move more slowly to achieve the balance between gravity and inertia.

Researchers suggest that cats employ this unique technique to prevent their whiskers, i.e., their extremely sensitive vibrissae, from getting wet and subjected to tension.

The video shows Cutta Cutta, the cat of one of the researchers, Roman Stocker:

Was this necessary?

The answer is simple: to explore the scientific unknown, which is part of our everyday experiences, is always very exciting.

“Science allows us to look at natural processes with a different eye and to understand how things work, even if that’s figuring out how my cat laps his breakfast, This project for me was a high point in teamwork and creativity. We did it without any funding, without any graduate students, without much of the usual apparatus that science is done with nowadays.” said Roman Stocker, a researcher at MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

The research could also be crucial in the field of soft robotics, which often models boneless but clever structures like an elephant’s trunk, an octopus’s arm, and now, a cat’s tongue.