What is the bird with the most vibrant plumage on the planet?

A team of scientists at Yale University have spent several years studying the molecules and nanostructures that give many species of birds their colorful plumage in order to determine which bird had the most colorful and magnificent plumage. Researchers have discovered that hummingbirds have the most colorful plumage in all of nature, according to their study published in the journal Communications Biology.

a clear winner

Hummingbirds are famous for their colors, sure, but it’s hard to quantify exactly how colorful they are. One way to measure color is to consider the theoretical total number of colored birds.

The range of colors in hummingbird plumage exceeds the color diversity of all other bird species in total, Prum and a team of researchers report June 23 in the journal Communications Biology. “We knew hummingbirds were colorful, but we never imagined they would rival all other birds put together ,” said Prum, the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Scientists collected more than 1,600 reflectance spectra from 114 different hummingbird species , and calculated the variety of colors that can be found in a hummingbird’s plumage. Hummingbirds are potentially the most colorful birds in the animal kingdom, at least from the perspective of the birds themselves: they can produce more than a third of the colors that their eyes can theoretically detect.

A rich range of colors

The researchers compared the hummingbird data with previously published work on color variety in other birds, including parrots, finches, penguins and quetzals. Specifically, they compared the information with the plumage of more than 100 species of birds. They found that hummingbird plumage color range equals or exceeds previous estimates for plumage color range for all bird species. In fact, they found that 84.5 percent of the total variety of colors identified in the plumage of all birds was also found in hummingbirds.

Birds have four types of colored cones that are sensitive to red, green, blue, and ultraviolet/violet colors. But they can also see a host of colors that humans can’t, including ultraviolet, and mixtures of ultraviolet with other hues, like ultraviolet-yellow and ultraviolet-green.

The sheer breadth of hummingbirds’ colorful plumage is the result of nanostructures in their feather barbules , the smaller filaments that project from their feather quills.

In the work, colors revealed in hummingbird plumage include saturated blues, teal greens, and deep purples that are most variable on the animals’ crown and throat, which they display prominently during mating displays and interactions. social.

“Observing a single hummingbird is quite extraordinary. But the combination of versatile optic structures and complex sexual displays make hummingbirds the most colorful family of birds of all,” says ornithologist Richard Prum , co-author of the paper.

The next thing will be to investigate the diversity of colors in other clades of birds.

Referencia: Gabriela Venable, Hummingbird plumage color diversity exceeds the known gamut of all other birds, Communications Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s42003-022-03518-2. www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-03518-2