Sweet Receptors In Hummingbirds

Animals have adapted many different methods to avoid being eaten by predators. Some animals may secrete poison from their bodies to deter predators so they taste bad and others may have spines, or other defensive mechanisms to signal to predators they are dangerous. Stripes on snakes such as coral snakes indicate a venomous individual and to signal any potential predator they are ready to fight back. However, animals that are more or less defenseless are more vulnerable, especially if they are full of nutrients and a hungry predator is nearby. Therefore they need to outsmart the potential predators to avoid death.

There has been cases where AVP and gustatory responses were correlated. A study conducted in japan illustrated that AVP modulate gustatory responses by controlling the activity of epithelial sodium ion channels (ENaCs)(119). These are channels that are found in the organs of the respiratory, urinary systems and that modulate salty and sour tastes. According to research done on hamsters, AVP in the blood could increase sensitivity to salty or sour tastes as AVP increases sodium ion currents in the epithelium channels which suggests that the threshold for stimulation of taste cells is being

In previous studies, Frank and Byram’s article suggest that taste and smell interactions are dependent on taste and odor. In their experiments, they gave subjects strawberry

Thus, the Null hypnosis is rejected, with a statistical significance shown in the choices of food made by the Physarum polycephalum showing that it can distinguish between food sources. This suggested a link with higher order animals seeking out theses organic chemicals, through a cellular response and not an emergent property (Adamatzky A, Costello, B 2012) Pervious research has discovered that Physarum polycephalum is attracted to various amino acids and sugars monomers, mannose, glucose, galactose and maltose with variances in the structure of amino acids, lipids and carbohydrates pointing toward different receptors being responsible for the recognition of differing substances (Barrosa V, et.al.

Darwin's finches, inhabiting the Galápagos archipelago and Cocos island, constitute an iconic model for studies of speciation and adaptive evolution. A team of scientists from Uppsala University and Princeton University has now shed light on the evolutionary history of these birds and identified a gene that explains variation in beak shape within and among species. The study is published today in Nature, on the day before the 206th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.

Hi, this is Michael Lan from the Johns Hopkins Inter-Asian Council, and we were wondering if you would like to perform this year at the annual IAC Winter Formal on December 2. The formal will take place in the Glass Pavilion and start at 7 PM, but if you are available to perform and would like to come early to practice, IAC will be providing food for you beforehand as well.

Sweetness is an important nutrition in the human body which may cause one to have feelings toward foods for essential nutrients and energy.

However, we still have not understood how planarians respond to food. One experiment was conducted to observe the reactions of planarians toward food or chemical stimuli. When four planarians were exposed to four different food source, 43% of the planarians moved to the first location (squash baby food). 25% moved to the second location (chicken baby food), 2% moved to the third location (control group), and 29% moved to the fourth location (mixture of squash and chicken baby food). According to Inoue, planarians will release chemotaxis as a response when they are exposed to chemical. In this case, planarians will operate the chemoreceptors to identify the location of the food. When four planarians were placed in the middle, they quickly marked their destinations. They would continue to move until they reach the place with high solute concentration. In this experiment, we do not know if the all the planarians were hungry or full. For some of the planarians that quickly moved away, we can determine that they were hungry. And when they sensory cells detect the chemical, they quickly reacted. However, planarians’ references of food are not important in this case. Despite the fact that all the foods are different, planarians might tend to move toward to places that closest to them or sense the strongest chemical signal from. As we know that planarians are carnivores, they prefer to feed on organic compounds and

It can help prove that too much sugar is not healthy and how our bodies digest them. The important terms that will be discussed in this paper are glucose, sucrose, fructose, sugar, and diabetes. Sugar is any class of crystalline carbohydrates such as sucrose, glucose, or lactose, that dissolve in water and have a characteristic sweet taste (The American Heritage Student Science Dictionary 331). When foods or drinks are sweet it is most of the time from sugar. There are many different types of sugars which are called carbohydrates (chemical compounds that only have carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and mostly made by different plants).

	Another important idea proposed by Mintz is that sweetness is naturally desired by humans. He supports this by reporting on the work of researchers studying infants in the United States and how they are drawn to sweetness without having prior experience with it. He also states on page 15 that Alaskan Eskimos "consume sucrose despite the discomforts associated with the offending items."

Hummingbirds, or the Trochilidae, pronounced Trok-ili-die, the scientific name of a hummingbird has many unique characteristics. for example, an average human's heart beats 1.3 beats per second but hummingbirds heart beat per second is 18 times that. 24! 24 heart beats per second for such a puny body. But it does make sense for how much their wings flap. That mean 200 heart beats per second when diving! But on the inside of the body their is something that is very weird, their tongue. A hummingbird's tongue is split into 2 parts. Each part has fringes. The 2 parts go into whatever their eating/drinking, and close together like chopsticks, and come back in. This happens in .067 of a second. This happens nearly 14 times in a second! Hummingbird's

The researchers trained bees to find food at a blue flower and no food at a green flower, and then tested the bees on a new blue-green flower. Bees that drank a small droplet of sugar water prior to the test took less time to land on the ambiguous-coloured flower. Other experiments showed that this behaviour wasn't due to bees just getting more excited or searching faster. This indicates that the sweet sugar water

Alaux et al. (2011) also found similar results for Mvl, whose expression is connected to the sugar responsiveness (Orgad et al., 1998) which is overexpressed in foragers brains (Ben-Shadar et al., 2004). PFD group also showed high expression of the gene very low-density lipoprotein receptor-like (XP_001122285). Provided that insects have no cholesterol, the mevalonate pathway is metabolically diverted to the production of juvenile hormone (HJ) (Bellés et al., 2005). We can speculate that in A. mellifera, XP_001122285 expression is associated with high titers of Juvenile Hormone (JH) and can act as a carrier of this hormone receptor. If this speculation is correct, the expression of such gene would also be associated with the forager status, where JH titles are higher (Fluri et al.,

The authors in this study examines the importance and the evolution of the bitter taste receptors in humans and apes. The T2Rs receptors are primarily responsible for bitter taste. Bitter taste is important because it helps organisms to distinguish between different types of food and avoid the ingestion of poisonous compounds since most of these compounds are bitter. Consequently, the researchers hypothesized that the receptors genes have evolved under species specific evolutionary limitations. The T2Rs gene reperoires were sequenced from human, chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes troglodytes), bonobo ( Pan paniscus), gorillas…..

"Hummingbird 's aggression were shaped by sipping nectar as often as every minutes. They compete by challenging and bullying each other in mid-air; post up and pirouette, dive to the grass, and paddle backward in dances of dominance that end suddenly as they begin. They will compete each other up in tall mountains near the equator that offer rich ecosystem at a variety of elevations.". "Hummingbirds are very small birds with a high metabolism, with heart rates can reach as high as 1,260 beats per minutes, therefore they must be fed constantly."< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummingbirds>. Both nectars and insects are the source energy and protein for hummingbirds. Hummingbirds can consume up to 50% of their weight in sugar, the nectar solution every each single day. "It is important to keep any nectar feeder clean and always filled