26 June 2009

Moonwalking bird - the Red-capped Manakin


Hummingbirds and rattlesnakes move parts of their bodies at amazing speeds. But male club-winged manakins -- colorful, sparrow-sized South American birds -- have them both beat, vibrating their wings at more than 100 cycles per second, twice the speed of hummingbirds. The bird uses this unprecedented feat not for fight or flight, but to impress females with its violinlike hum...

Manakins are lek-breeding birds, meaning that the males compete to mate, while the females raise the young. Since the males do not couple to raise young, a single male could inseminate all the local females. Therefore, competition for females among lek-breeding birds creates strong pressures for sexual selection.

While other birds make wing sounds -- including other types of manakins, grouse, pheasants, hummingbirds and birds of paradise -- and many of the 40 kinds of manakins have developed wing buzzes, snaps and hums, none of these sexually selected adaptations are as extreme as the club-winged manakin, Bostwick said.

The video documents the amazing wingspeed, but the impressive part is the moonwalking. Skip to the 2:30 mark if you're in a hurry, but it's better to encounter it after the more prosaic prologue. The moonwalk is laugh-out-loud quality humor when you encounter it in the midst of this academic presentation.

Found at Anything and Everything.

Reblogged June 26 in light of Michael Jackson's death. Moonwalking has been all over the mainstream television news and the blogosphere today. Let me repeat my previous suggestion: "Skip to the 2:30 mark if you're in a hurry, but it's better to encounter it after the more prosaic prologue. The moonwalk is laugh-out-loud quality humor when you encounter it in the midst of this academic presentation."

Enjoy. And Michael Jackson, we will miss you.

3 comments:

  1. Much more enjoyable than Michael Jackson. Better-looking, too.

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  2. Fascinating, and totally endearing (the researcher, too, not just the birds). What I'd like to know is, given that the birds move faster than our human eyes can perceive, what does this say about the power of the birds' eyes (or, actually, their brains), in comparison to ours? They would be interpreting this visual information somehow: otherwise, they wouldn't be doing it, I'd guess.

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  3. Lots of animals have faster vision rates than humans. In fact for many animals normal TV looks like a slide show presentation, they see each frame.

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