Have you seen a Humming bird flitting from flower to flower drinking sweet nectar from its long beak? Well, these birds have a long tongue that helps them lap up their meals. Till now, scientists believed that these tongues have thin capillaries through which nectar was believed to flow up by suction method. However, a new study suggests that this may not be the case and instead, the tongues of Humming birds consist of long and thin pumps.
Noted ornithologist Alejandro Rico-Guevara, of the University of Connecticut in Storrs has put forward his study on how the bird’s tongues work. Rico-Guevara and his team propose that the hummingbird tongue is like an elastic micro-pump. Their theory relies on the same tendency of water molecules to grip each other that lets water rise up an open tube.
In a video show, the birds rarely dip open grooves into nectar. Instead, bird beaks squash the tongue and its grooves flat. When the tongue tip touches nectar, the grooves spring open. That pulls up a column of nectar as the grooves expand. This pulling, or pumping, slurps nectar faster. Hummingbirds do this tongue dipping fast. The tongue forks into fringed halves at the tip. Rico-Guevara says he has clocked 23 licks per second.
To make his own study of the grooves, Rico-Guevara went looking for birds with Kristiina Hurme. She studies bird behavior. The pair coaxed 18 hummingbird species in the forests to sip on camera. The videos showed that the birds’ tongue grooves mostly stayed closed when waiting for nectar. And when tongue met nectar, the fluid moved fast. Interesting way to eat, isn’t it?
Image credit: wikipedia
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