Research

Hummingbirds the focus of UTSC scientist’s research

The fascinating biology of hummingbirds is at the centre of the research of Professor Ken Welch, a comparative vertebrate biologist and new professor in the department of biological sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Renowned for their hovering flight and incredibly fast wings, hummingbirds have the highest metabolism of all animals (except for insects), which supports their rapid wing beats.

These beautiful and unusual creatures were the focus of a recent one-hour feature on the American PBS scientific program Nature, including footage of Welch during his two years working at the University of California Riverside in the laboratory of scientist Doug Altshuler. The January 10 episode focused on hummingbird biology and included new research which Welch helped to pioneer before his arrival at UTSC this past September.

“Very little is understood about how hummingbirds achieve such incredible physical performance,” said Welch. “Their muscles likely represent a pinnacle of vertebrate skeletal muscle design and function. By studying muscles at this extreme of the performance spectrum, we can uncover basic rules that apply to the design and function of all muscles and better understand what goes wrong when muscle function is impaired, as with humans suffering from degenerative diseases.”

While at Riverside, Welch was involved in examining aspects of the hummingbird’s mechanical power output – how and just how much physical force is produced by their powerful flight muscles – as well as understanding how hummingbirds use neuromuscular signaling to modulate and control muscle activity to engage in different flight behaviours.

Welch earned his PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara. While there as a graduate student, he focused specifically on how hummingbirds fuel their activities via their narrow bills with newly ingested nectars. The tremendous amount of energy needed for the birds to engage in their characteristic mid-air hovering was central to this research.

Now at UTSC, Welch is continuing research on hummingbird energetics and flight performance, as well as expanding on his previous work. He is particularly interested in the metabolic processes of hummingbirds that allow them to use and expend ingested sugars at rates so fast they even exceed by several times the rates by which human athletes burn through the sugar in Gatorade or other power drinks. He is also interested in understanding what tradeoffs or limitations in their mechanical performance are the cost of operating these muscles at such extreme frequencies — speed that can be observed during the hummingbird’s hovering flight.

This article was originally published on the UTSC website.

Tags: Featured Researcher, Ken Welch, Science, science & technology, UTSC