They have gills that permit them to take oxygen from the water. But have you ever wondered how vertebrates eat food?Now researchers at Brown University have x-ray video that shows the action in great detail.Many fish are power eaters. Bass, for example, can eat goldfish in one big swallow.Thomas Roberts is a biology professor at Brown University. He and his co-workers used new tools to record the fish's movements as it ate."And those tools were a combination of high speed x-ray videoscombined with CT measurements of the bones of the skull in the bass and pressure probe measurements of the pressure in the water during suction feeding."Thomas Roberts says the muscles in the head are not powerful enough to create that suction.He says they must work together with the body muscles used for swimming.
