When the hummingbirds sleep

Hummingbirds are tiny, light birds with a rapid metabolism, yet they don’t store much fat for backup energy. They have the unusual capacity to enter a torpor at night, a condition akin to hibernation, in order to save energy. Researchers at TIFR Hyderabad Anusha Shankar said that “they get cold (50°F/10°C) sometimes every night and rewarm safely every morning, without damaging organs like their hearts and brains.”

She recently conducted a fascinating question-and-answer session at Aaromalé Café, where she described the daily activities and energy manipulations of hummingbirds. Her area of interest is exactly this: comprehending how animals satisfy their energy requirements in various settings. She investigated the world of hummingbirds for more than ten years. While pursuing her undergraduate and graduate degrees, she traveled to India to study hornbills, hoolock gibbons, and king cobras. After completing her doctorate at Stony Brook University, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University and the University of Alaska Fairbanks for two years.

She is now researching wild Indian animals at TIFRH and how they react to tropical settings where humans are the dominant species. As a Ramalingaswami Fellow and National Geographic Explorer, she enjoys reading novels, practicing different dance forms including swing, bachata, and salsa, and mentoring youngsters.

Based on their thermoregulation, their nighttime energy levels, and a variety of other behaviors, I calculated how much time they would spend on various activities. That taught us that while they may spend a great deal of time just hovering and soaring, they spend most of their time perching, according to Shankar.

She then contrasted her own behavior patterns with those of the audience in an effort to contextualize hummingbird behavior. “PhD study is challenging; you constantly question if you’re allocating your time effectively. Using a phone app, I began monitoring my time spent on various activities. I discovered that I slept for eight hours every night, or a full one-third of my time. I suppose I was simply living and taking showers for quite some time. I came to realize that dancing is mostly my high-energy pastime. That accounted for just 5% of my time; in comparison, hummingbirds engage in high-energy activities for 22–84 percent of their daily lives. I thus don’t even come close to meeting their minimum,” she said.

Shankar then revealed something quite fascinating: hummingbirds use a condition of energy conservation known as torpor to go dormant. “I was curious about what hummingbirds were doing at night because I couldn’t imagine how they survived if they were eating so little and using up so much energy.” Since the 1950s, researchers have been examining this topic. They use a tactic known as torpor, which is, in common parlance, the same as a deep sleep but differs medically from human sleep. She described it as an inert condition in which they are essentially worthless.

She went on to say that torpor is a more comprehensive word than hibernation. The latter is a kind of torpor in which you remain unconscious for more than a day at a time. similar to ceasing to exist for a week or a month. And it is a daily version of what hummingbirds utilize. They can utilize it to scale everything in only one night, the speaker said.

She demonstrated and cycled through images of hummingbirds captured by thermal cameras, explaining how, as a scientist, she could comprehend the differences in body temperature these little birds experience when they enter and exit torpor. There were a lot of questions thrown at her throughout the spirited session, and she handled them all with astounding grace.

“Why don’t they have a community-based strategy where a few of them are asleep and the rest are in torpor?” was one of the more intriguing questions posed. Anusha said, “We should suggest that to them,” to which the whole group chuckled. She went on to explain that hummingbirds tend to be lonesome birds. Some birds just don’t congregate in groups. They just say, “I’m going to live my life alone,” without more explanation. They’re neither sociable or communal, the woman said.

“I tend to overthink things in general, and partner dancing is one of the few spaces when I just zone out and am free just moving to music and connecting with people,” she stated in response to a question on how salsa dancing helps her handle stress. Social exercise is the only kind of exercise I really love doing! Since I’ve started social dancing since 2012, I can feel my size decreasing if I don’t dance for a long.