Ostrich, Llama Will Debut In TV Show for Children

C. Richard Taylor, Agassiz Professor of Zoology, spends much of his time studying exotic animals like kangaroos, wallabies and setifers. But he's very rarely seen with them in public.

This week, though, the Head Tutor of the Biology department will appear on a children's television show with an ostrich and a llama.

Taylor, who has spent 14 years studying animal running and the evolution of locomotion, will give a demonstation this Friday on the "Measurement Week" episode of "3-2-1 Contact," a Public Broadcasting System (PBS) program for 8- to 12-year-olds.

Taylor will use an ostrich in order to show how scientists can determine the speed at which animals run. In the program, the ostrich will run on a treadmill and Taylor will count the number of times a mark on the track goes by, plugging the result into a formula for the bird's speed.

He will also use a llama to demonstrate principles of animal running.

Taylor said yesterday that The Children's Television Workshop, which produces the three-year-old, Emmy Award-winning series, contacted him after reading about his work in The Wall Street Journal and National Geographic.

"I only did it because I have a 7-year-old son whose favorite show is '3-2-1 Contact."' Taylor added, noting that his son Gregory visited his father's lab last summer to watch a half-day of the shooting.

Taylor has focused his research to study how muscles use energy. In his work Taylor has shown that an animal's total weight is the most important factor in how much energy each muscle uses in running.

Taylor said that a mouse uses 15 times more energy per gram of muscle than a horse running at the same speed.

Similarly, "whether it's a human running, or whether it's an ostrich or a horse, if they weigh the same they'll use the same amount of energy" to run, Taylor said.

New knowledge about the way muscles work has been used to design athletic tracks and prosthetic limbs, and in rehabilitating patients, Taylor said.

"The muscles are really doing different kinds of things than what people thought they were," he added.

Despite the complexity of his field, the instructor of two undergraduate courses said his discussion in the show was developed painstakingly to make it appropriate for children.

The producers of the show, he said, frequently stopped during the filming of his segment to ask him to rephrase his statements.

"We do every sentence about 20 times," Taylor said, adding that "they will go back and have you repeat a sentence to get the wording right."

Taylor's segment will appear in the episode of "3-2-1 Contact" to be aired this Friday at 5:30 p.m. on WGBH, channel 2, the Boston PBS affiliate.