Date: December 18, 2018
Source: Princeton University
When it
comes to flirting, animals know how to put on a show. In the bird world, males
often go to great lengths to attract female attention, like peacocks shaking
their tail feathers and manakins performing complex dance moves. These
behaviors often stimulate multiple senses, making them hard for biologists to
quantify.
Hummingbirds
are no exception when it comes to snazzy performances, as males of many species
perform spectacular courtship dives. Broad-tailed hummingbirds (Selasphorus platycercus) fly up to 100
feet in the air before sweeping down toward a perched female, then climb back
up for a subsequent dive in the opposite direction. At the Rocky Mountain
Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, home to a population of breeding
broad-tailed hummingbirds, researchers from Princeton University have been
investigating how hummingbirds combine speed, sound and color in their
displays. Their work appears in the Dec. 18 issue of the journal Nature
Communications.
"The
dives are truly amazing feats for such small birds," said Benedict Hogan,
a postdoctoral research associate in ecology and evolutionary biology and the
study's lead author. "We know from previous work that the males can reach
really high speeds. They combine that speed with intriguing noises generated by
their wing and tail feathers, and of course with their brightly iridescent
plumage." But how do these different components fit together, and what
might a dive sound like and look like to a female?
No comments:
Post a Comment