Oxygen..

[Jackalope]

It's also not a particularly efficient process. 75% of inhaled O2 is exhaled unused.

Also, if the air you breath has no oxygen content, your body would not alert you to the fact that you are suffocating. You just pass out peacefully and die.

True. The physiological sensation of suffocation is your body's response to excess carbon dioxide, not a lack of molecular oxygen. No oxygen = no carbon dioxide.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Another trivia, the gas exchange in a chicken happens inside its bones, abdominal cavity, as well as in its lungs. If you nick the main wing bone of a chicken, you can tape up the chicken's nose and beak, and it can still breath.

Seems an awful lot of work to go through, not to mention the chicken may have had something planned for later that day.

Boru

[Anomalocaris]

Another trivia, the gas exchange in a chicken happens inside its bones, abdominal cavity, as well as in its lungs. If you nick the main wing bone of a chicken, you can tape up the chicken's nose and beak, and it can still breath.

Seems an awful lot of work to go through, not to mention the chicken may have had something planned for later that day.

Boru

Well, I always found the respiratory systems of birds an awe inspiring organ.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Seems an awful lot of work to go through, not to mention the chicken may have had something planned for later that day.

Boru

Well, I always found the respiratory systems of birds an awe inspiring organ.

'Awe Inspiring Organ' would be a great name for a band.

Boru

[Heywood]

Also, if the air you breath has no oxygen content, your body would not alert you to the fact that you are suffocating. You just pass out peacefully and die.

This is true

I've always wondered why executions were not done with a CPAP mask and a bottle of helium that can be purchased at a party store.

---

All birds, dinosaurs and their relatives do it better, even more distant relations of birds like alligators do it better. Most mammals do it poorly.

Another trivia, the gas exchange in a chicken happens inside its bones, abdominal cavity, as well as in its lungs. If you nick the main wing bone of a chicken, you can tape up the chicken's nose and beak, and it can still breath.

How many chickens did you have to nick to figure this out Chuck?

[Anomalocaris]

Didn't have to. Ornithologists have known it since the 19th century.

[Heywood]

Didn't have to. Ornithologists have known it since the 19th century.

hmmm....I have always imagined you as that crazy Calabasas man who nicks up chickens in his back yard.

[Anomalocaris]

i would never do that when the moon is not full.

[TheRealJoeFish]

Didn't have to. Ornithologists have known it since the 19th century.

I imagine someone in the early 1800s, saying "hmm. Science tells us that when you repeatedly slash a live chicken it dies, and when you strangle a live chicken it dies... But what happens when you do a little of both?"

[Anomalocaris]

Well, no, it was not trial and error that led to this discovery. Rather ornithologists noted that unlike self contained mammalian lungs, bird lungs are linked to an interconnected network of air sac that extends throughout the bird's abdominal cavity, and penetrates into the spine and the long bones of the limbs. So just like humans can be ventilated through a treacheal tube because it is connected to the self contained lung of mammals, a bird can suck air through any opening made into its interconnected air sacs.

It is to illustrate this dramatic difference between simple mammalian lungs and complex bird respiratory system that ornithologists pulled the stunt of cutting a small notch on a chicken's wing, and taping its mouth and nose and have it breath through the notch on its wing.