yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

TIL: Hummingbirds Are the World's Hungriest Birds | Today I Learned


less than 1m read
·Nov 11, 2024

If you were to use energy as quickly as a hummingbird, you'd have to eat a fridge full of food or about 300 hamburgers every day in order to survive. They use energy so quickly as they fly, so, so fast. A lot of the flowers they feed on are really delicate, and if they were to perch on them, then they would pull the flower off. They have to hover in one place, which is really energy consuming. It's one of the most energetically expensive activities in the animal world, I think.

So, they use energy really, really quickly in order to survive. Everything about them is really tiny. The smallest hummingbird is like the weight of a dime, and the largest is 20 grams, which is maybe nine dimes stuck together. They don't have much room to store fat. If you were really heavy with fat, then you wouldn't be able to fly. So, they have to feed on nectar many, many, many times during the day.

If hummingbirds didn't have flowers to feed on, they would starve in as little as two hours. So, next time you need a snack, be thankful it's not a life-or-death situation.

All bees buzz, but bumblebees are one of the very few types of bees that actually take that buzzing sound and use it like a secret weapon to get pollen.

More Articles

View All
Continuing the Fight for Political Representation | 100 Years After Women's Suffrage
Good afternoon everyone. My name is Rachel Hardigan, and I’m a senior writer with National Geographic. Today, we’re continuing our conversation, our celebration of women’s suffrage, and talking about the ongoing fight for political representation. It too…
The First Monotheistic Pharaoh | The Story of God
Amid the remains of dozens of pharaohs, Egyptologist Salma Ikram is going to help me find one whose name is Akhenaten. There he is! Yep, he thought that there were too many gods and not enough focus on him. There will need to be an important god whom onl…
How Was Video Invented?
[Click] [High-pitched CRT TV noise] Film is a very straightforward technology. It just involves taking a two-dimensional image and focusing it onto a two-dimensional piece of film, and there you have a photo. But video, and by that, I mean moving electron…
Bitcoin Just Got Cancelled
What’s up, Graham? It’s Guys here. So, this is not the video I was planning to make today, but here we are. Tesla and Elon Musk just completely pulled the rug from underneath Bitcoin, and with one single tweet, $365 billion was lost from the entire crypto…
8 Benefits Of Traveling Alone
The first time I truly traveled alone was around five years ago. I didn’t really know what to expect and how it would be to face the world equipped with a small trolley and backpack. Well, it was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had. So, I did it…
Geoff Ralston: The Story of Your Startup
Yeah, I just wanted to spend a couple of minutes talking about something that I think is absolutely vital to startup success. But although it’s fundamental, it is often somewhat overlooked, and that is really the invention, the creation of the story of yo…