Background: Grit is used by birds mainly for grinding hard food items but can also serve a nutritional role as a source of minerals. Ingestion of grit by birds has been documented primarily in species that feed on see...
Intra and in terspecific competiti on for n ectar play an imports nt role in hummingbird communities. Larger sized species usually exclude smaller species from the rich floral resources. However, it has been recently ...
Animals that feed from resources that are constant in space and that refill may benefit from repeating the order in which they visit locations.This is a behavior known as traplining,a spatial phenomenon.Hummingbirds,l...
This research was supported by research funds from INECOL(20030/10563);a competitive grant(155686)from the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología(CONACyT)awarded to J.F.O.
Aims While the influence of mistletoe-host interactions on each other’s evolution is well-recognized,the role of interactions between mis-tletoes and its mutualistic pollinators and seed dispersers mediated by host s...
supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(61601505)
This paper introduces an optimization algorithm, the hummingbirds optimization algorithm(HOA), which is inspired by the foraging process of hummingbirds. The proposed algorithm includes two phases: a self-searching ph...
supported by the National Science Foundation under CBET-0954381 to H.Luo and IOS-0920358 to T.L.Hedrick
A quasi-steady model describing aerodynamics of hovering Ruby-throated hummingbirds is presented to study extent of the low-order model in representing the flow physics of the bird and also to separately quantify the ...
I am deeply grateful to EW. Hochachka, C.L. Gass, K.C. Welch, Jr., J.R.B. Lighton, C. Martinez del Rio and O. Mathieu-Costello for their contributions to the research that led to the ideas presented and questions raised in this paper. Research on which this article is based was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (IOB 0517694).
Hummingbird migration is a remarkable feat, given the small body sizes of migratory species, their high metabolic rates during flight and the long distances traveled using fat to fuel the effort. Equally remarkable is...
In nature hummingbirds face floral resources whose availability, quality and quantity can vary spatially and temporally. Thus, they must constantly make foraging decisions about which patches, plants and flowers to vi...
Acknowledgments I thank S. Weinstein, A. Varma, and T. Feo for assistance in the field; L. Benedict and T. Libby for use of equipment, J. Brown for accommodations, and G. Weston-Murphy for assistance with the wind tunnel. Walter Nussbaumer kindly allowed use of a photo. The manuscript was improved by comments from T. Feo and two anonymous reviewers. The research was supported by the MVZ and National Science Foundation IOS-090353 to R. Prum.
Multi-component signals contain multiple signal parts expressed in the same physical modality. One way to identify individual components is if they are produced by different physical mechanisms. Here, I studied the me...