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Brightly colored feathers may be the key to these female hummingbirds avoiding physical fights with others of their kind.
Female hummingbirds tend to have muted feathers, but researchers have found that about 20% of white-necked Jacobin females have shiny feathers – like their male counterparts – which keeps them from being socially harassed, according to one. study published Thursday in Current Biology.
Young birds often start with the coloring of female feathers, but in the case of this hummingbird species, they are born looking like males, said study author Jay Falk, who worked as a doctoral student at Cornell. Lab of Ornithology and the Smithsonian Tropical Research. Institute during this study. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Seeing all the young birds look like males “is quite unusual in birds, and it was so unexpected that it took me a few years to see it in the data,” Falk said.
As the hummingbirds he studied grew, only 80% of the females molted into duller colors, leaving the remaining females with male coloration.
Researchers placed hummingbird taxidermy mounts in Gamboa, Panama, and observed how other hummingbirds interacted with them.
Male-colored females faced less social harassment from other male and female hummingbirds compared to their more deaf counterparts, Falk said.
Hummingbirds often chased or pecked at each other, he noted.
Scientists aren’t sure how or why some females retain their male plumage, but adaptation may be related to food, said Kimberly Rosvall, associate professor of biology at Indiana University at Bloomington, who doesn’t did not participate in the study.
“The data suggests that these more aggressive females with male-like plumage are more adept at defending a key food resource,” she said. “They hunt more and are hunted less.”
Easily available food is an essential resource for hummingbirds because they have a high metabolism, which means they have to eat a lot, said James Dale, professor of zoology at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, who did not participate in the study. .
Social protections of colored plumage
The females could avoid fighting with the brightly colored birds because they could be dangerous, Falk said.
“She might recognize that dull females are less dangerous, which leads her to engage in assaults with dull females,” he added.
Although this is rare in the experience, Falk said men can bother women to woo them.
Male hummingbirds don’t help raise their offspring, Dale said, and they can have more offspring if they can convince more females to mate with them.
In the experiment, the males preferred to mate with the female hummingbirds that had a dull female coloring rather than the male-colored females, Falk said. However, the males also courted and mated with the male-like female mounts, he added.
Going forward, Falk said he wanted to research why only some of the female hummingbirds look like males as adults.
Research has shown how beneficial it is for female hummingbirds to have male-colored feathers, Dale said, but most females do not retain their male-colored plumage.
“Despite the costs of harassment, there must be some benefits for females that morph into a distinctly feminine coloring,” Dale added.
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