New Scientist
Image: David Hofmann
Not content with being the fastest mover on the planet, the Anna’s hummingbird is also the fastest shaker.
An ultra-slow-mo camera that can shoot at up to 650,000 frames per second has caught the birds performing a micro-shimmy that is 10 times faster than a dog shakes after a bath.
Andreas Peña Doll and Rivers Ingersoll, both students in David Lentink‘s lab at Stanford University, California, filmed Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna) performing the body shakes in flight. The birds’ tiny bodies shook 55 times each second.
“It’s the fastest shake of any vertebrate on the planet,” says Lentink.
The achievement adds to a growing list of speed records set by Anna’s hummingbirds. During courtship, males fly nearly 400 times the length of their body each second
, making them the fastest moving vertebrates, relative to their body size, in the world. The hummingbirds use that speed to make their tail feathers vibrate like the reed of a wind instrument and produce chirps far louder than their vocalisations. Read more on newscientist.com…
