Some of the best athletes play for the NFL, one of the most valued sports organizations in the world. Staying healthy is extremely important for these athletes, and researchers across the country have been studying ways to assure this. Surprisingly, they have landed on the head-banging woodpecker for inspiration.
Since 1976, researchers have been studying woodpeckers’ injury-less brains, which can withstand the trauma they experience constantly from pecking. Their cranial bone structures and neck muscles protect the birds from forces 1200 times the force of gravity. This being said, they have also been models for football helmets and neck collars in the past. However, a more recent study published in Science has shown that woodpeckers may not be completely concussion-less.
George Farah, a neurobiologist at Boston University, and his colleagues obtained ten different woodpecker specimens from museums along with five non-woodpeckers for comparison. After sectioning the brain, dye was added, revealing deposits of abnormal proteins in eight of the ten woodpeckers and zero of the other species. The protein deposits were in the front of the brain, which is where an abnormal protein, tau, builds up in humans signifying brain damage. Head trauma is what causes this protein to be dislodged from cells and deposit in the brain in humans. Surprisingly, two of the woodpeckers’ protein deposits tested positive for tau.
However, the role of tau in a woodpecker’s brain is not completely known. Scientists did not jump to the conclusion that tau signified brain damage; instead, they thought about how tau also functions as a shape stabilizer in neurons. The woodpeckers could have the ability to dissolve deposited tau, or the tau could be a mechanism for dealing with the head trauma they experience.
Either way, researchers in the past had never considered whether woodpeckers’ brains had tau or not, especially when it was a model for NFL protective gear. Peter Cummings, a coauthor in the study, stated, “I assumed that woodpeckers didn’t have tau accumulation in their brains, just like in the research world had and the athletic equipment world had.”
These shocking new findings were not necessarily reassuring when it comes to the NFL players’ protection, but it could be the start of a new revelation about the best way to keep their heads safe.
