Adult male ruby-throated hummingbird in flight. Image credit: Sherri and Brock Fenton (CC BY 4.0)
Torpor is an energy-saving strategy used by warm-blooded animals, including birds and small mammals. Similar to hibernation, although shorter in duration, torpor is a state of minimal activity, low body temperatures and reduced metabolism that helps animals conserve energy in unfavorable conditions. Some animals use torpor to survive times when food is not readily available. Hummingbirds, for example, eat nectar all day long to meet their high energy needs, but must build fat reserves to see them through their overnight fast. If they go to sleep with too little fat, they can descend into torpor to stretch out that limited energy supply and survive until morning.
Many hummingbirds migrate to areas with warmer weather, where food remains available, for the winter months. The ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris), for example, travels over 5,000 kilometers in its fall migration. Like most long-distance migrants, ruby-throated hummingbirds increase their fat stores before departing, using these stores to fuel their journey. It is thought that this bird may use torpor as a way to accelerate fat build up before its annual migration. However, it remained unclear whether hummingbirds switched from using torpor strictly in energy emergencies, to using it as strategy to prepare for migration.
To shed light on this question, Eberts, Guglielmo and Welch investigated when, why and how hummingbirds save energy using torpor during the summer, and whether there are seasonal shifts in their use of torpor coinciding with migration. Eberts, Guglielmo and Welch hypothesized that a bird would initiate daily torpor if its energy stores fall below a critical level during the night, but that they may abandon this threshold (triggering torpor at higher fat levels) in late summer as a way to spare energy and gain fat before their annual migration.
To test their hypotheses, Eberts, Guglielmo and Welch tracked body composition, food intake, energy expenditure and torpor use throughout summer in a group of captive ruby-throated hummingbirds. In the middle of the summer, the birds entered torpor and remained torpid for longer when they went to sleep with low fat stores. In late summer, however, the same birds were more likely to enter torpor at consistent times and when they had higher fat stores. Eberts, Guglielmo and Welch also observed that the more time birds spent in torpor, the more fat they gained. This suggests that in late summer, hummingbirds switch from using torpor as a survival strategy to using it to maximize energy savings before migration.
These results clearly define the physiological rules governing torpor use in hummingbirds. They also support the long-standing assumption that torpor helps migratory species save energy and accumulate fat stores before long-haul flights.
