Vultures have never been considered anywhere near cuddly, always portrayed as circling down on carcasses ready for a meal. Chowing down on decaying meat doesn't elicit fuzzy feelings either, but it turns out vultures simply have the stomach for it.
In a study published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers took the liberty of exploring the guts of turkey vultures to see what makes these scavengers tick. According to their findings, the turkey vulture naturally has the stomach for its unsavory habits, gifted with guts teeming with the right kind of bacteria to kill off all the others that may be on the dead meat they are feasting on.
It's obvious how a vulture exposes itself to millions of bacteria given it eats rotting flesh, but it also does so through the means it eats. Rotting carcasses are generally soft but to get to the juiciest bits, a vulture will stick its beak into its prey's anus. There, the bird is involved in a meet-and-greet with all the bacteria living in the dead prey's feces, on top of all the other bacteria already digesting through the carcass.
It's no surprise that the vulture will have bacteria in its gut, but researchers didn't expect to find such a limited number inside the scavenger bird. Just how limited? There were only 76 kinds of bacteria inside a vulture, the most common of which are the Fusobacteria and Clostridia, bacteria that are highly dangerous to humans. Fusobacteria has been linked with colon cancer, ulcers and gum disease, while Clostridia causes tetanus, gangrene and botulism.
It sounds like vultures are still bad news, but researchers see the study's results in a different light.
"People oftentimes don't recognize the enormous ecosystem services that vultures offer to humans. It's a free, mobile sanitation department. They're discarding and consuming and getting rid of millions of pounds of decaying flesh that could threaten public health. And now we know that they also kill off most of the microbes instead of passing them back into the ecosystem," explained Gary Graves, birds curator for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and the study's co-author.
Additionally, researching the inner workings of vultures may someday allow scientists to pass on their resiliency to humans. You've never heard of a vulture with rotting limbs or bleeding gums, right?
They don't look like it, but deep within vultures is the possibility to save lives.
