How Cats Drink: Inertia, Gravity, and the Froude Number at the Tip of a Tongue
Cats use the dorsal surface of the tongue tip to entrain a liquid column, then close the jaw before gravity and pinch-off remove it. Reis and colleagues modelled the timing with inertia, gravity, a Froude number, and the tongue’s travel geometry. The relevant domestic-cat parameter is a modified Froude number near 0.4—not the simple Froude number near one.