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A researcher of University of Florida observed and videotaped four confined caimans and three alligators, both close relatives of the crocodile, while eating on a spit of dry land at Florida’s St Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park. Zoologist Kent Vliet found that five of the seven animals bawled as they tore into their food, with some of their eyes even frothing and bubbling. "There are a lot of references in general literature to crocodiles feeding and crying but it is almost entirely anecdotal. And from the biological perspective there is quite a bit of confusion on the subject in the scientific literature. So we decided to take a closer look," Vliet said. Vliet said he began the project after a call from D. Malcolm Shaner, a consultant in neurology at Kaiser Permanente, West Los Angeles, and an associate clinical professor of neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Shaner, who co-authored the paper, was investigating a relatively rare syndrome associated with human facial palsy that causes sufferers to cry while eating. For a presentation he planned to give at a conference of clinical neurologists, he wanted to know if physicians’ general term for the syndrome, crocodile tears, had any basis in biological fact. Shaner and Vliet also found reference to crocodiles crying in scientific literature but it was contradictory or confusing. One scientist, Shaner said, working early last century, decided to try to determine if the myth was true by rubbing onion and salt into crocodiles’ eyes. When they didn’t tear up, he wrongly concluded it was false. "The problem with those experiments was that he did not examine them when they were eating. He just put onion and salt on their eyes," he said. However, Vliet said that the causes of the tears remain a bit of a mystery. He believes they may occur as a result of the animals hissing and huffing, a behaviour that often accompanies feeding. Air forced through the sinuses may mix with tears in the crocodiles’ lacrimal, or tear, glands emptying into the eye. The study is published in the latest edition of the journal BioScience. — ANI
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A
new study has authenticated the phrase "crocodile tears" by
discovering that crocodiles really do weep while eating but it is
purely physiological reasons that makes them bawl.