Hummingbirds do this tongue dipping fast. Rico-Guevara says he has clocked 23 licks per second.
The skinny, translucent tongues have no muscles in them. But they have a semicircular groove on each side. The tongue forks into fringed halves at the tip. Rico-Guevara first started studying the tongue tips. Those tips are not so much capillary tubes as traps for nectar, Rico-Guevara and colleague Margaret Rubega proposed in 2011. Based on high-speed video, they argued that as the squashed grooves touch nectar and spring open, the fringe helps capture nectar. Proposed as an alternative to capillary rise, “it was going against what everybody believed,” Rico-Guevara says. “It got a lot of attention but also a lot of skepticism.”
Other scientists countered with computer simulations and their own videos of birds in the lab. They argued that, regardless of what happens at the tip, capillary suction is important in drawing nectar up the grooves.
Hummingbirds do this tongue dipping fast. Rico-Guevara says he has clocked 23 licks per second.The skinny, translucent tongues have no muscles in them. But they have a semicircular groove on each side. The tongue forks into fringed halves at the tip. Rico-Guevara first started studying the tongue tips. Those tips are not so much capillary tubes as traps for nectar, Rico-Guevara and colleague Margaret Rubega proposed in 2011. Based on high-speed video, they argued that as the squashed grooves touch nectar and spring open, the fringe helps capture nectar. Proposed as an alternative to capillary rise, “it was going against what everybody believed,” Rico-Guevara says. “It got a lot of attention but also a lot of skepticism.”Other scientists countered with computer simulations and their own videos of birds in the lab. They argued that, regardless of what happens at the tip, capillary suction is important in drawing nectar up the grooves.
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