On a family trip to Atlanta, Víctor Ortega Jiménez spent time taking pictures and videos of flamingos as they fed in their pond. It wasn’t to admire their long legs or flamboyant pink color. Instead, he noticed the “beautiful” ripples spreading across the water as the birds ate under the surface. But he didn’t know why the waves were happening.

It took “more than four years to answer that question,” says Ortega Jiménez, of the University of California, Berkeley. “But I think the answer was fascinating.”

Ortega Jiménez’s focus is biomechanics, or the study of how mechanics applies to animal movement and structure. His goal is to understand how animal behaviors might lead to human-made engineering feats.

He discovered that, by retracting their heads, flamingos produce vortexlike traps with water to scoop up algae. They stomp around — or dance, if you will — amplifying the vortex. The series of motions brings the food to their crooked beaks.…