Anna’s hummingbird/Becky Matsubara, CC license(Originally published by Knowable Magazine—Written by Bob Holmes)Everyone loves to watch hummingbirds—tiny, brightly colored blurs that dart about, hovering at flowers and pugnaciously defending their ownership of a feeder.But to the scientists who study them, hummingbirds offer much more than an entertaining spectacle. Their small size and blazing metabolism mean they live life on a knife-edge, sometimes needing to shut down their bodies almost completely just to conserve enough energy to survive the night—or to migrate thousands of miles, at times across open ocean.Their nectar-rich diet leads to blood sugar levels that would put a person in a coma. And their zipping, zooming flight sometimes generates g-forces high enough to make a fighter pilot black out. The more researchers look, the more surprises lurk within those tiny bodies, the smallest in the avian world.“They’re the only bird in the world that can fly upside down and backwards,” says Holly Ernest, a conservation ecologist with the University of Wyoming. “They drink pure sugar and don’t die of diabetes.”Ernest is one of a small number of researchers studying how hummingbirds cope with the extreme demands of their lifestyles. Here’s some of what scientists have learned about the unique adaptations of hummingbirds.Put in the...
