March Monthly Meeting

Thursday, March 13, 2014- Alejandro Rico-Guevara – “Hummingbird Feeding Mechanics: Implications of Ecology and Evolution”

Every animal on earth faces a great challenge every day: It has to find enough food to survive but also because the amount of energy obtained will determine the outcomes of every task it undertakes, from growing to reproducing. In the wild, resources are limited because different kinds of animals have developed ways to rapidly consume them. Alejandro, a researcher in Margaret Rubega’s ornithology lab at UConn, investigates an extreme example of this specialization to exploit resources in the quickest way possible: hummingbirds drinking nectar. The ultimate goal of his work is to bridge the gap between our knowledge of how feeding works, why that leads to certain foraging decisions, and how ecological and evolutionary patterns emerge from the relationships between feeding mechanisms and behavior. The research is fascinating. To understand the hum-mingbird world one needs to slow them down while they do what they have evolved to do better than any other vertebrate: feeding on flowers. Alejandro has studied their drinking mechanism using high-speed cameras, filming over a thousand frames per second at full resolution, and using different cinematography tricks to achieve top quality research information. He has filmed hummingbirds from California to CT and from Canada to Brazil, pursuing different species with bizarre beak shapes. He has even developed and deployed automated systems to trigger high-speed cameras in high-Andean forests, the habitats with the most species of hummingbirds in the world.