The secret that BIG DENTISTRY doesn’t want you to know: replace your dentist with a flock of birds today!

Aug 14, 2023

bird dentist, bird floss, dental bird, dental floss, dentist bird, symbiosis, trochilus

Background:

It has been reported, since the time of this guy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus), that there is a type of bird that picks food out of the teeth of crocodiles, who are unable to properly acquire or use dental floss.

Specifically, we have:

The apparently-mythological “crocodile bird”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochilus_(crocodile_bird) (Figure 1)

And occasional video sightings of random birds picking stuff out of the teeth of crocodiles (so this behavior is apparently at least plausible).
But it looks like it isn’t well-supported: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleaning_symbiosis.

Conclusion: birds are not reliable dentists… at least, not to crocodiles!

Fig. 1: From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochilus_(crocodile_bird), captioned as “Illustration from a 17th-century copy of al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-Ḥayawān (“Book of the Animals”). It’s definitely a book—or at least a page of some sort—with some animals. Beyond that, I make no guarantees of the accuracy of the caption above, however.

Proposal:

The fact that these birds are not naturally good at dentistry doesn’t mean we can’t train them (in this capacity, humans are superior to crocodiles).

It should be a simple matter to train a bird—ideally a long-lived one, like a parrot—to find food by pecking it out from between a person’s teeth (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: This symbiotic relationship between a “dental floss bird” (left) and a human (right) benefits both parties. The bird would need to be selected to have an unusually fine needle-like beak.

After training a bird in this fashion, a person could throw away their dental floss and just whistle for a bird any time they needed their teeth flossed. Very convenient!

PROS: Should increase dental hygiene and provide jobs for previously-freeloading unemployed birds.

CONS: Some birds might start to expect that all humans have delicious food stuck between their teeth. This might cause the birds to relentlessly attack humans in search of delicious morsels, at which point they might discover that the entire human is edible, which could lead to the situation documented in 1963’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_(film).