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DW (English)
  • 1/28/2025
Hummingbirds are acrobats of the air that owe their unique agility to anatomical peculiarities and a missing gene. This Tomorrow Today viewer question comes from Frederick B. in Ghana.

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Transcript
00:00How come hummingbirds are able to fly backwards?
00:09Hummingbirds are acrobats of the air.
00:11They can fly forwards, sideways, backwards, and even hover in one spot.
00:16Other birds aren't nearly as agile.
00:19Their agility is partially down to their small body size, but above all it's made possible
00:24by some anatomical peculiarities.
00:28Hummingbirds have very flexible ball joints in their shoulders.
00:31In addition, the upper bones in their wings are very short and the ones that in us form
00:36hands are unusually long.
00:39This allows the little avians to move their wings in practically any direction.
00:44When hovering in the air delicately to sip nectar, they can beat around 80 times per
00:50second.
00:51That's what makes the hummingbirds hum.
00:55It resembles the way some insects fly.
01:00Other birds can also remain in one place in the air, but only for short periods.
01:05That's because no other form of locomotion in the animal kingdom consumes as much energy
01:10as hovering flight.
01:13The hummingbirds don't give it a second thought because their heart, lungs, and wing muscles
01:17are huge compared to their body size.
01:20But even more important is that they have faster metabolism than any other vertebrate.
01:25Their high energy requirements are met by the sweet nectar they consume, which they're
01:30also able to absorb very quickly.
01:34Hummingbirds have highly reactive enzymes that allow them to break down both fructose
01:39and glucose at the same fast rates, something humans and other animals can't do.
01:45One study looked at how this ability affects the flight muscles.
01:50Scientists sequenced genomes from different hummingbirds and compared them with those
01:54from other bird species.
01:56The results showed that all hummingbirds lack a certain gene.
02:00Experiments on muscle cells allowed scientists to reconstruct what it does, and they discovered
02:06that its absence improves the metabolism of sugar.
02:10The gene also causes the activity and number of mitochondria to rise in the muscle cells.
02:18Mitochondria are called cellular power plants because they play a key role in energy production.
02:24So hummingbirds owe their flying skills to both their physique and their genes.

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