Why vultures can eat rotten meat without getting sick

Wondering how vultures can eat a carcass and not get sick? Well vultures may have one of the toughest diets in the animal kingdom but their bodies are built to cope. These birds can feed off carcasses that would make most animals dangerously sick, because their digestive systems are specially adapted to destroy harmful bacteria, tolerate certain toxins, and process decaying flesh with remarkable efficiency.This makes them much more than scavengers. They are nature's clean-up crew, helping remove dead animals from the landscape, and reducing the spread of disease in the process.A stomach built for decayBy the time a vulture reaches a carcass, decomposition has already begun.The bacteria digesting the meat create chemicals that are toxic to many animals.But vultures have evolved extremely powerful stomach acid that acts like a biological disinfectant, destroying most dangerous microbes before they can cause harm.Researchers studying vulture gut bacteria found that the birds’ digestive tracts are highly selective. Out of the many bacteria found around the beak, only a very small number dominated the gut, showing a strikingly low diversity of microbes inside the digestive system. That ...