can emus fly?
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can you fly your own plane to another country
Any private airplane can fly internationally, not just jets. There may be different equipment requirements in the destination country to be complied with. There is a certain amount of paperwork involved but that can usually be done thru your computer or smart phone.
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can you fly in horizon zero dawn
No. There’s only 3 you can control that serve as mounts. The rest are controllable but only for combat, not mountable. The 3 mountable ones are land based.
Why Can’t an Emu Fly?
The emu has wings and feathers, but he can’t fly. He’s the second largest bird on earth, after the similarly flightless ostrich and is native to Australia. Emus were once able to fly, but evolutionary adaptations have since robbed them of that gift. A quick look at the emu would suggest he is too heavy to fly, but the reasons are more complex.
Short Wings
An emu’s wings are smaller than a crow’s, measuring approximately 7 inches. The wings are so small that they’re concealed by the bird’s body plumage. The wings are small and they’re not particularly well built. For a bird to achieve flight, he needs strong wings that can propel his body mass upward, the feathers are structured to give strength to the wings without weighing them down. The poor emu’s wings are adorned with poor quality flying feathers that looks more like shaggy fur.
Fast Legs
The emu can’t fly, but he can run. Capable of achieving speeds of up to 30 mph, his long powerful legs are his only mode of transport. He doesn’t run to hunt though, as his diet consists mainly of bugs and vegetation. He runs to escape danger.
Easy Pickings
Throughout history, the emu has been fortunate enough to be surrounded by food. He is a ground-feeding bird and is more capable than most other species of birds at turning his food into body mass. Because the species is flightless, extra body mass isn’t a disadvantage, so the emu has been able to thrive; those who were best at bulking up survived better than those who didn’t.
Lazy Ancestors
Scientists at the Australian National University believe the emu evolved to be flightless because his ancestors got lazy. With few living predators, scientists believe that the emu’s only real threat was from dinosaurs. When the dinosaurs became extinct, the emu had no reason to be able to fly, so it didn’t. Over time, emus with weaker flying ability would have been removed from the gene pool by dinosaurs. But they managed to survive and reproduce, because the threat was gone.
How emus and ostriches lost the ability to fly
Evolutionary tweaks to DNA that bosses genes around may have grounded some birds.
New genetic analyses show that mutations in regulatory DNA caused ratite birds to lose the ability to fly up to five separate times over their evolution, researchers report in the April 5 Science.
Ratites include emus, ostriches, kiwis, rheas, cassowaries, tinamous and extinct moa and elephant birds. Only tinamous can fly.
Regulatory DNA gets its name because it’s involved in regulating when and where genes are turned on and off. It doesn’t contain instructions for making proteins.
Researchers have long debated whether big evolutionary changes, such as gaining or losing a trait like flight, occur mostly because of mutations to protein-making genes tied to the trait, or result mainly from tweaks to the more mysterious regulatory DNA.
flightless Galápagos cormorants
Revealing the importance of regulatory DNA in shaping evolution could shed light on how closely related species with the same genes.
such as chimps and humans or moas and tinamous, can develop vastly different looks and abilities.
Scientists have tended to stress the importance of protein-coding changes affecting the evolution of various traits in many organisms. Examples are relatively easy to find. For instance, a previous study of flightless Galápagos cormorants suggested that mutations in a single gene shrank the birds’ wings (SN: 6/11/16, p. 11).
In general, mutations that alter proteins are likely to be more damaging than changes to regulatory DNA, and thus easier to spot.
Camille Berthelot
says Camille Berthelot, an evolutionary geneticist at the French national medical research institute INSERM in Paris. A protein may be involved in many biological processes throughout the body. “So everywhere this protein is [made], there’s going to be consequences,” she says.
By contrast, many pieces of DNA may be involved in regulating a gene’s activity, and each may work in only one or a few types of tissue. That reduces the damage that changing one regulatory segment might have, rendering those bits of DNA easy targets for evolution’s experiments. But, at the same time, it also makes it much harder to determine when regulatory DNA is actually involved in big evolutionary changes, says evolutionary geneticist Megan Phifer-Rixey of Monmouth University in West Long Branch, N.J. Those pieces of DNA don’t all look alike and may have changed a lot from species to species.
regulatory DNA
Those regulatory DNA bits tended to be located near genes involved in limb development, an indication that they might tweak gene activity to produce smaller wings.
The team tested the ability of one such regulatory DNA bit, called an enhancer, to turn on a gene in developing embryonic chicken wings.
A version of the enhancer from elegant-crested tinamous — which can fly — turned on the gene, but a version of that same enhancer from the flightless greater rhea didn’t. That result indicates that changes in that enhancer disabled its wing-development function and might have contributed to flightlessness in rheas, the scientists say.
