Meeting Abstract
The athletic courtship displays of hummingbirds can be striking and might be physically strenuous. Aerial dives (Pearson, 1960; Mitchell, 2000; Clark 2009) as well as short-range “shuttle” displays are performed by male Allen’s (Selasphorus sasin) and Black-chinned Hummingbirds (Archilochus alexandri) during courtship. During a shuttle display, a male flies acrobatically from side to side within a meter of a perched female. Throughout these displays, wingbeat frequency increases dramatically, and trill sounds are produced as a male flies side to side. We hypothesize that, during the display, males face tradeoffs between wingbeat frequency and stroke amplitude, and between the frequency and amplitude of the display itself. Hence, the shuttle display may function to advertise individual flight performance as it relates to kinematic tradeoffs experienced during the shuttle (Byers et al., 2010; Barske et al., 2011). We measured wingbeat frequency, stroke amplitude, and wingtip velocity, as well as the frequency, amplitude, and velocity of individual displays by using high-speed and conventional cameras. We analyzed the kinematic tradeoffs endured by Allen’s and Black-chinned Hummingbird males during shuttle displays using new kinematic analysis software (Theriault et al., 2014).
