The researchers placed eight artificial flowers wrapped in sucrose at the hummingbird's feeding base and then tracked the frequency of visits by several hummingbirds.
Every ten minutes, the researchers would fill the artificial flowers with sucrose again, and the rest of the time, they would no longer provide food. It turned out that every ten minutes, shortly after they filled the flowers with sucrose again, hummingbirds "came to visit." Why do hummingbirds have such excellent time memory?
In the study, the researchers also found that hummingbirds can remember not only the types of food they have just eaten, but also what they have eaten at about when, so they can easily eat things that have not yet been "tasted" by themselves.
What's even more surprising is that hummingbirds can not only judge the "approximate time" of visiting those food species, but also accurately delineate their "sphere of influence". In this way, when hummingbirds forage again, they can find new foods according to the regularity of nectar re-secretion by different plants.
When you go out again, you can do it without "disturbing" the plants whose nectar has been polished by themselves.
But then the question arises: Why do hummingbirds, whose brains weigh only 20 grams or less, the size of a grain of rice, have such an amazing memory? Scientists speculate that this may benefit from their "workouts" on long-distance flights.
Every year before the arrival of winter, hummingbirds will travel more than 3,000 kilometers to warmer places, because they are too small to spend valuable time looking for food, under the pressure of survival, over time they have developed a superb memory.
Hummingbirds are experts in flying. Due to its small size, hummingbirds can only vibrate their wings at great speed like insects, ensuring that they can fly in the air, and their wings vibrate at a speed of 50 times per second. The little hummingbird has three flying stunts: flying backwards, rising and descending vertically, and "stopping" in the air at rest. Hummingbirds are the only birds in the world that can hover in the air, and this unique way of flying allows them to forage calmly among the flowers. #Hummingbird ##奇妙的动物 #
