In a new study, a team of scientists aimed to set the record straight on the hummingbird's tongue after nearly two centuries of seeing it a different way.
According to Live Science, the researchers observed the hummingbird's tongue acting like an "elastic micropump" using high-speed cameras. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, contradicts research published in 1833.
Scientists have long believed the hummingbird tongue acted as a hair-thin straw, but the authors of the new study found that to be highly inefficient compared to their findings.
"We could see the actual drinking mechanism through high speed video, but we couldn't develop the fluid dynamics model needed to test our biophysical hypothesis," study lead author Alejandro Rico-Guevara, a research associate of functional morphology at the University of Connecticut, said in a press release.
The researchers set out to explain how the hummingbird can drink nectar so fast, and noticed how the bird would augment its tongue to create elastic energy.
"The compressed tongue remains flattened until it contacts the nectar," the researchers wrote in the study, according to Live Science. "After contact with the nectar surface, the tongue reshapes filling entirely with nectar.
"We show that the tongue works as an elastic micropump.
"Fluid at the tip is driven into the tongue's grooves by forces resulting from re-expansion of a collapsed section [toward the mouth]."
Also important to the researchers was understanding the relationship between the hummingbird and the flower it was taking nectar from.
"Nectar is kind of a bribe," study co-author Margaret Rubega, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at UConn, said in the release. "It's payment for the hummingbird to come frequently enough so that they will go off and act as pollinators to other flowers of the same species."
