[Sugar³]

Bumble Birds are excellent beyond calculability.



All things should be Bumble Birds instead of whatever bull shit they are now, because only Bumble Birds don't upset my stomach!

[kellyhound]

Hummingbirds took just 22 million years to diversify from a single common ancestor into 338 tiny, colorful species. And they have not finished yet.

Evolutionary biologist Jim McGuire of the University of California, Berkeley, and his collaborators have found that although some hummingbird groups have saturated the available space in their environments, others are still developing into new species at an extraordinary rate. By comparing their rates of speciation and extinction, McGuire's team calculated that the number of hummingbird species could double before reaching an equilibrium in the next several million years. The results are published in Current Biology.

“This is unique evidence of one of the most spectacular known examples of an incomplete adaptive radiation,” says Juan Francisco Ornelas, an evolutionary biologist at the Institute of Ecology in Xalapa, Mexico. ('Adaptive radiation' is biologists' term for a rapid differentiation into distinct species.)

Hummingbirds are only found in the New World, and the majority of species live in South America. McGuire’s team carried out the largest-ever study of the group's evolution by comparing DNA from 284 species.

“It’s impressive,” says Robb Brumfield, a geneticist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. “The samples they used are the product of 30-plus years of ornithologists lugging nitrogen tanks and collecting in remote regions” of Central and South America. The researchers collected tissue samples and needed to keep them frozen to allow for DNA sequencing.

Fast workers
The analysis showed that hummingbirds fall into nine major lineages, which have diversified from each other in South America over the past 22 million years. But they first diverged from a sister group — the swifts — around 42 million years ago, and fossils suggest that this split must have happened in Eurasia. “That’s a pretty big gap!” says McGuire. Hummingbirds cannot fly across oceans, so they must have travelled overland, crossing a land bridge over the Bering Strait into North America before heading south.

Once they reached South America they radiated dramatically — especially in the Andes. These mountains represent just 7% of the land area in the Americas, but they are home to 40% of hummingbird species. Many of these must have arisen within the past 10 million years. This was the time when the Andes started rapidly rising, which suggests a possible role of the mountains in stimulating diversification.

“The Andes are kind of the worst place to be a hummingbird,” says McGuire. These birds “have super-high metabolic rates and oxygen availability is low. It’s also harder to hover because of the reduced air density. And yet, they’re up there doing it.” Although some insects are known to forage at high elevations, he says that there are relatively few insects in the cold, high mountains, leaving room for hummingbirds to take their place pollinating flowers. The mountains also provide a smorgasbord of habitats, from isolated valleys to steep slopes with rapidly changing climates. Hummingbirds are well suited to exploit such niches.

But Ornelas says that McGuire and his team overstate the importance of the Andes environments. Judging from the bright colors, elaborate ornaments, spectacular courtship displays and complex calls typical of hummingbirds, sexual selection has almost certainly played a major part in their evolution.

Either way, hummingbirds are producing new species at a decelerating pace, probably because they are running out of space or ecological niches to fill. But McGuire found that some lineages have diversified 15 times faster than others, and and still maintain an elevated pace. “The rates are all over the place,” he says. “Even though ecological space is starting to run out, there’s still room for more species.”

Amazing creatures

[soja]

they don't even look real how they move...look almost computer generated.

I put out some hummingbird feeders when I was a boy but none ever came to visit and I think that is where my life started to go off track. if only the bumble birds would have visited me as a boy.

[Sugar³]

Some more.

[Sugar³]

Originally Posted by sojalemmi ↗

they don't even look real how they move...look almost computer generated.

I put out some hummingbird feeders when I was a boy but none ever came to visit and I think that is where my life started to go off track. if only the bumble birds would have visited me as a boy.

They're really cool to watch up close, but most of them don't act the same if you're standing right there--all the coolest little chirp battles happened when I left the camera recording.
I'm trying to sync, as closely as possible, the shutter speed to their wing's flap rate. You can see it happening when their wings appear to slow right down to almost stopped, but not blurry. I think that it's just over 1/2000th of a second. It's not so easy though, there are tree shadows all day and to raise the shutter speed means less light, and to compensate for that I either have to let the video, become grainier, or loose depth of field in focus. That's the tricky one, I like shallow depth of field usually, but Bumble Birds are moving closer and farther from you just as often as they are side to side. It's hard to tell on the camera screen, but I can definitely spare some grain--I'm gonna try some more today.

[Sugar³]

My point was, I bet they look CG because I'm trying to capture more of all axises of their movement in focus. Most video I've seen of them have really shallow focal depths. That's the trade--either more 3D focusing, or better and more fluid movement.
Lighting would solve all of this, but the effing switch is all the way over there.

[soja]

Originally Posted by Dr Thrumpkinz ↗

They're really cool to watch up close, but most of them don't act the same if you're standing right there--all the coolest little chirp battles happened when I left the camera recording.
I'm trying to sync, as closely as possible, the shutter speed to their wing's flap rate. You can see it happening when their wings appear to slow right down to almost stopped, but not blurry. I think that it's just over 1/2000th of a second. It's not so easy though, there are tree shadows all day and to raise the shutter speed means less light, and to compensate for that I either have to let the video, become grainier, or loose depth of field in focus. That's the tricky one, I like shallow depth of field usually, but Bumble Birds are moving closer and farther from you just as often as they are side to side. It's hard to tell on the camera screen, but I can definitely spare some grain--I'm gonna try some more today.

that's really cool. I was wondering why I was able to see their wings, its what gives them that computer generated look, their movements don't look like they would make sense in gravity, really interesting. you are quite the auteur.

as you may know from some posts I have made, I absolutely love birds. always. When I was a teen and tripped on shrooms for the first time, I got scared and overwhelmed and I walked to a little stream and I was crying because of the fear. then, out of nowhere, some little bird landed right next to me, like literally right in front of my face, I couldn't believe it. The bird looked at me and in my mind I thought about how weird it was that this bird was like, trying to communicate with me and I wondered if maybe the bird was god. but then I looked around me and I saw the beautiful, vibrant colors of the grass, and the dirt, and heard the song of the water moving by and I saw all the trees waving at me and it was all so gorgeous and profound and it was in that moment that I realized that god was everything and all around me and how could I ever be so blind, why should I ever fear anything? and my tears turned to laughter and I went home and made my dogs turkey sandwiches.

I was never afraid of my mind or my insanity after that and whenever I see big groups of birds flying by, I always take it as a sign that everything is ok and everything is going as it should.

next time I will tell you about the time I was working a job at an apartment complex and I was ordered to execute all the baby birds I found in the nests in the laundry vents. That was a quite the emotional odyssey for me

[Sugar³]

Originally Posted by sojalemmi ↗

I was never afraid of my mind or my insanity after that and whenever I see big groups of birds flying by, I always take it as a sign that everything is ok and everything is going as it should.

➡⬆⬇➥➦

[soja]

haha...been there

[William May]

When I calculated the excellence of hummingbirds, the answer I came up with was 32 Quintillion.
That is accurate within about 40 million, more or less. So they are indeed excellent.