Hey hummingbirds!
You think you’re so perfect, fluttering around, lookin’ all pretty?
Well we finally found a way to make you look clumsy and dumb!
Just like us!
Hey bird lovers!
I’m Chastity, filling in for DNews.
Hummingbirds are incredible creatures, aren’t they?
Just watching them in flight, darting from flower to flower, is awe-inspiring.
To drink nectar from flowers, hummingbirds rely on their ability to hover.
But how do they do it?
Engineers from Vanderbilt University teamed up with a biologist from University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill to create a detailed, aerodynamic simulation of hummingbird flight.
The simulation demonstrates that the way a hummingbird flies is much more closely related
to insects than it is to other birds.
Unlike other birds, Hummingbirds can generate lift not just on the downstroke, but on the
upstroke as well.
This happens by inverting their wings.
Larger birds get practically all of their lift on the downstroke.
Insects, however, can also hover, fly back and forth, and side to side.
Their wing construction may be different, but like the hummingbird, insects also produce
lift from both the upstroke and downstroke.
Hovering, in itself, is an amazing feat that requires intense visual processing.
But two researchers from the University of British Columbia claim to have found a glitch
in the hummingbird hover system.
The researchers found that altering a hummingbird’s visual stimuli while it attempts to feed causes
the bird to falter in flight.
The hummingbirds were put into a laboratory flight arena.
They hovered around a plastic feeder in front of a surface that projected images.
When still images were projected, the birds had no visible response.
Moving images, however, seemed to trip their game up.
A rotating spiral, for example, caused the hummingbirds to drift backward repeatedly
as they tried to make contact with the feeder.
Kind of like me trying jog and drink water at the same time.
The poor hummingbirds still could not get used to the moving images when the researchers
repeated the experiment.
When the bird’s beak broke contact with the feeder, a re-boot was triggered - the
bird would come back to its original hover position, only to get tripped up again by
the same images.
The researchers explain that this experiment suggests quote - “the hummingbirds' visual
motion detection network can over-ride even a critical behavior like feeding."
These findings could open a door to more research on other interesting ways that flying birds
use visual information.
Tell us about your favorite bird in the comments below, and check out more cool science videos
here.
*point below* And don’t forget to subscribe for more DNews.
I’m Chastity and I’ll see you next time.