Geese are beautiful birds with pristine whiteness and graceful swimming, but that quickly changes when they open their beaks and strange quills poke out. The images that manage to capture what’s inside their beaks can be a little disturbing and lead us to wonder, what’s inside, what are the geese hiding inside their beaks.
An Unexpected Sight
From a distance, the geese do not seem offensive in any way, on the contrary, they inspire peace as you watch them swim with their enchanting aquatic dance. The last thing that comes to mind is that these are animals to be wary of, but anyone who has had the opportunity to be close to these birds knows that you should keep your distance.
An angry goose is such an uncontrollable force. In some regions they are used as guards to protect farms from intruders. When they open their beaks, the first thing we see is a considerable amount of somewhat terrifying quills, which can be difficult to find a shape for at first sight. It may even seem that a completely different animal is lodged in their mouths.
But the truth is that there is no intruder, what you can see is its inner beak which features some sort of teeth as is the case with most mammals, but it all gets out of balance when you notice that the tongue also has these so-called ‘teeth’.
Are They Really Teeth?
Although one could almost swear that these are sharp teeth that geese use to attack, they don’t really fall into the category of teeth because of the material they are made of.
Teeth, like ours or those of other mammals, are made of three hard tissues (enamel, dentine and dental cementum) and although they also have a soft compound known as dental pulp, they are extremely strong. In contrast, the ‘teeth’ that geese have in their beaks and on their tongues are more like quills, as they are made mainly of a type of cartilage called thymus.
Biologists call these barbs conical papillae, which are found along the tongue and work in conjunction with the row of papillae around the contour of the beak. Both rows, as well as the structure of the beak, are designed to enhance the cuts caused by their bite. And while they do not have enamel or hard coatings like our teeth, the beaks of geese are really efficient at cutting into surfaces such as roots, stems or small animals.
Some species of geese additionally have barbs on the back of their tongues to prevent the food they are trying to swallow from being regurgitated. More or less the same goes for turtles and some penguin species that can also look terrifying. Other species that also have conical papillae are swans and ducks – nature is as beautiful as it is strange.
This story was originally published by Alejandra Martínez in Ecoosfera.
