Meeting Abstract
Locomotor performance is important for animals, especially hummingbirds, which catch mobile prey, avoid predators, defend territories, and perform aerial courtship displays. Using black-chinned hummingbirds (Archilochus alexandri) we investigated the relationships of three flight-performance assays (i.e., weight-lifting vertical flight, top-speed flight in a wind tunnel, and maneuvering flight through a string maze), the effect of sex, and the repeatability of these measures. We found no significant relationships among the three flight-performance assays. Males and females differed significantly in morphology, and weight-lifting performance, but not in top-speed flight performance or flight through a string maze. We show that the weight-lifting and top-speed flight measures are highly repeatable. We submit that our assay for maneuverability was insufficient, in our system, to detect expected differences in maneuvering flight given the dissimilarities in morphology between the sexes. Although our flight-performance assays have been proposed as proxies for power output, our results suggest these performance measures are independent of one another.
