Hummingbirds: Tiny Acrobats And The Marvel of the Bird World

Explicit content warning

09/01/21 • 50 min

2 Listeners

Hummingbirds are the world’s smallest bird species, with a heart rate of 500 beats-per-minute on average and a breathing rate of 250/minute. Hummingbirds are nearly always on the edge of starvation, so they need to eat their body weight in nectar each day. Which might explain why some female white-necked Jacobin hummingbirds have evolved to look like male hummingbirds. Because, guess what? Male hummingbirds can be jerks.
In The Good The Bad The New
The Bad:
The EU has removed US travelers from Covid safe list. This is because of all the idiots out there that will take horse medication but not the actual vaccine.
The Good:
Thank you to the San Francisco Airport (SFO) for protecting the San Francisco garter snakes and red-legged frogs. We at Better Than Human are friends of Snakes and Frogs.
Hummingbirds are tiny acrobats with the fastest wingbeat of all birds, (70 strokes per second or more than 4,000 per minute). Unlike other birds, they can hover, fly backwards, and even fly upside down! Hummingbirds have the highest metabolism of all animals. They had an amazing amount of energy and live a relatively long time for their size.
Hummingbirds are native only to the Americas and thrive from Alaska to the tip of South America and are specialized to the flowers they eat from.
Listen now to learn about these tiny marvels of the bird world.
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Previous Episode

European Eels: The Fish Whose Life Cycle Scientists Still Don't Understand

The European eel (Anguilla anguilla) is a snake-like, migratory fish. Eels spend most of their adult lives as freshwater fish, but are born and die in the ocean. How they’re born and how they die scientists are still trying to figure out. And we better figure it out quickly because European eel are a critically endangered species. So no jellied eels for you.
But first:
Jennifer tells the story of her boomer encounter in the doctor's office. And by boomer, we mean, OK boomers, the group of boomers who don’t care how their behaviors affect other people.
In the Good, the Bad, the News
The bad, Cuomo is a dick and he abandoned his dog. And Amber reads some comedic crime blotters.
The good, 4oceans Solar-Powered Beach Robot filters plastic 30x faster than humans. Then, Patagonia (the outdoor clothing company) dumps a ski resort which held a far-right fundraiser. Fuck Marjorie Greene.
So little is known about European eels that up to 1777, we didn’t realize eels were fish and thought that they spontaneously generated in the "guts of wet soil". Sigmund Freud couldn’t find the eel’s male sex organs and gave up on biology entirely in frustration. European eels may use magnetic fields to navigate thousands of miles through the Atlantic Ocean, but who knows why they travel thousands of miles to spawn. Lots of people like to eat European eels, so poaching and smuggling is a big threat to the species. We also have not figured out how to raise them in captivity.
Listen now to learn about the European eel, an animal we like to eat, but know very little about.
For more information on us, visit our website at betterthanhumanpodcast.com
Follow us on Twitter @betterthanhuma1
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We look forward to hearing from you, and we look forward to you joining our cult of weirdness!
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You've got two empty halves of coconut and you're bangin' 'em together.

Next Episode

Black Holes: The Center of Every Galaxy

What most people know about black holes, they’ve learned from sci-fi. In this genre, black holes (spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape) can often do some nifty things, like time travel. In real life, however, black holes are a whole lot more interesting. A compact mass of deformed spacetime with zero volume and infinite density? Sign us up to learn more.
In the Good the Bad the News
The Bad
The next solar storm could knock out the internet for months. Which will be a problem for most of us.
Fuck Texas, the new abortion ban is not about protecting fetuses. Abortion bans are a way to control women, specifically lower income women. Because, rich so-called “pro-life” individuals will always have access to safe abortions.
The Good
A Beekeeper in France has invented a trap that can stop Murder Hornets. Want to learn more about Murder Hornets? Listen to our 2020 episode on them https://www.buzzsprout.com/603916/3727583
Amber’s good news is that when our sun turns into a supernova in 5.5 billion years, it will not turn into a blackhole, cause it’s too small. Yay?
Although Black Holes have an enormous effect on any object crossing it’s path, it has no locally detectable features. In theory, you could be standing right next to one and not realize it. If you did observe it, you’d notice that clocks near it would seem to move slower, because time is literally going slower in a Black Hole. This might be a good way to travel forward in time, however, once you enter it, you can never leave it. No one will hear you scream either, because information cannot escape a black hole....
Listen now to learn about Black Holes, more interesting than a science fiction movie.
For more information on us, visit our website at betterthanhumanpodcast.com
Follow us on Twitter @betterthanhuma1
on Facebook @betterthanhumanpodcast
on Instagram @betterthanhumanpodcast
https://www.tiktok.com/@betterthanhumanpodcast
or Email us at [email protected]
We look forward to hearing from you, and we look forward to you joining our cult of weirdness!
#betterthanhuman #cultofweirdnes