Futuristic Hummingbird Drones
By Ivy Xerxes Glossopharyngeal
July 14th, 2022
At this time of year, ruby-throated hummingbirds hover like psychodelic nymphs by our zinnias and Mexican firecrackers, as well as a strategically placed feeder. For me personally, there's no greater experience among the animal world than seeing a hummingbird in action - and it's more accessible than say: watching a falcon stoop into a dive or a cheetah chase down it's prey. They flit and dip outside the window like ornate fairies on parade.
As a tribute to their phenomenal beauty, a recent study on the plumage of hummingbird species discovered that there is colors among hummingbirds feathers than there is in all the birds studied so far combined, and that it added 56% to known plumage diversity in the bird world. This info, in addition to the numerous hummingbird's that have been zipping around lately, had me wondering, what is different about their brains? There must be some secret to how they can move the way they do, spending 90% of their time hovering and rotating, and able to fly at quick speeds, for some species over 60 mph, and also the only bird that can...fly backwards.
Like many birds and bees, hummingbirds are tetrachromatic, and have a cone in their eye that can also discern wavelengths in the UV range, which is something we can't see. Because of flowers' coevolution with birds and insects, they are willing to accommodate the hummingbird with a UV reflection of a bull's eye pattern to zero in on.
The bright non-UV colors help humans find and propagate flower species, but we don't need to stick our noses in the ovule and get nector like the hummingbird does. It's the light in the UV range that also reflects off the hummingbird feather that contributes to the incredible diversity. To another bird, a hummingbird must look even more like surrealistic neon art than it does to us. But it's what happens to this visual information once it leaves the eye and goes into the brain that is most stunning.
The hummingbird brain is 4.2% of the total body weight on average, the largest in the bird world (which are usually large relatively), compared to 2% for humans.
But what about the nuts and bolts of the hummingbird brain itself? What is different? Doug Wylie and Andrew Iwaniuk at the University of Alberta discovered in 2006 that the lentiformis mesencephalic, deep in the middle of the brain, receiving projections from the eye, is comparatively 2-5 times bigger in the hummingbird that in other birds. This region detects visual motion, and sends that information to the 'Michael Jordan' area of the brain, or the cerebellum, which is responsible for knowing where you are in space, or proprioception. The cerebellum and optic lobes are also much larger in the hummingbird than in other birds, making them one of the best, if not the best bird athlete.
Hummingbirds are also capable of beating their wings 60-80 beats a second, depending on the species, with some as low as 12 and others as high as 90, to hover like a helicopter - or more accurately a tireless wing flapping plane. In order to understand what's different about the neurons in their lentiformis mesencephalic, in 2017 Andrea Gaede, Doug Altshuler and colleagues from the University of British Columbia in collaboration with Doug Wylie recorded the activity of the cells in an Anna's hummingbird and found that unlike other birds, mammals, reptiles, etc. - this area for visual motion in the hummingbird is equally capable of processing information from all directions equally and this is also true for projections to basal optic root in the accessory optic system.
Recording from neurons that respond to visual motion in the hummingbird brain. Gaede et al. 2017.
Other birds, and vertebrates tested are better at detecting what comes from behind into the periphery, not from all directions. So essentially, when we move our head after detecting motion coming from behind or the side- the hummingbird can clearly see this throughout their visual field.
So they can handle visual motion with no problem and could probably read a book while in a blender. A hummingbird isn't getting motion sickness on a roller coaster, a silly silo or while watching the Age of Ultron. They'd have no problem in virtual reality, or going from the real world to the upside down. Unless Vecna gets a hold of them while they are hovering.
But to support their system they need the human equivalent of 150,000 calories per day. With a metabolism 77 times faster than a humans. Their weird forked snake-like tongues, can extend into a flower 15 times a second pumps nectar into their beak by expanding flaps With several specialized enzymes for breaking down fat in the liver, and also a poor ability to shuttle sugar for storage in cells, resulting in a high blood sugar level that would kill a human, or at least as high as a kid on Halloween night, keeps sugar available for immediate use as energy in a hummingbird. They are also jacked like a flyweight boxer, to use the Ruby throated as an example - they have elevator muscles (supracoracoideus) are 50% the mass of the depressors (petoralis), compared with 5-10% in most birds. They have all red muscle fibers in these muscles for sustained use, the only bird in the world with only red muscle fibers, as white muscle fibers are for short bursts (a flightless bird like a chicken, for example, has all white muscle fibers). In all, the paired flight muscles make up 25-35% of hummingbird weight, compared with 10% in other flying birds.
To supply oxygen to their flying machines, birds also counterintuitively have the smallest genomes in land dwelling animal world. The tiny genome allows for smaller red blood cell size in order to sustain flight, because even though the nucleus with it's DNA is extruded as blood cells mature, the overall size ends up smaller at the end, and there is more cells by blood volume to move oxygen. And among the birds, hummingbirds have the smallest of them all
Therefore, with compact nuclei with less DNA, birds have twice as many neurons in the brain as mammals. Since hummingbird genomes are even smaller than other birds, their neurons can pack even more tighter. This makes recording activity from hummingbird neurons even more difficult and amazing.. Although...even though it's scientifically important.... there might be a special place in the afterlife for someone who sticks electrodes into a hummingbird brain, or someone who sacrifices a hummingbird and all it's beauty for any reason....
Therefore even though hummingbirds have a brain the size of a peanut (not a grain of rice: myth). it has more than twice the amount of brain cells for a mammal with a similar size brain.
Even though they can do their taxes in a tornado, how do they pinpoint their flowers and feeders? Recently, it was observed that hummingbirds in the wild use numerical order to locate nectar in flowers, almost an instinctive counting algorithm. This, combined with recent evidence that they also have an enlarged hippocampal formation compared to other birds provides a window into the way they locate and remember. Pyramidal neurons in the hippocampus have 'place cells' that retain memory of certain locations - therefore this leads to the next study that might be possible: recording from place cells in the hippocampus of hummingbirds combined with an accurate understanding of how they locate nectar with numerical proficiency and memory could create algorithms to develop some sick drones....
Wait a minute, what did I read in the visual motion study? Researchers were studying their visual motion processing to find new algorithms to create better drones...unless...hummingbirds are already drones sent through time from futuristic humans, or aliens from another planet to study us - and the more we study them the more we will realize we are disassembling an artificial machine, until we finally decipher it, and can then create it, to send it back in time...for us to study...to decipher it....so we can create it...to - whoa, that got weird fast...
Let's not go down that rabbit hole - let's just think about their exquisite brains and beauty as the drivers and inspiration for creativity they are.
