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.

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

When we taste something it is a process. Molecules enter the body in a solid or liquid form. They stimulate taste receptors on the tongue. There are five basic taste sensations: salty, sour, sweet, bitter, and umami. Umami is the latest addition. It is considered to be meaty, broth, or savory. Tasting begins with the tongue, which contains papillae. Papillae are divided into four areas:

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

Silva et al., 2015). We have taste receptors on our tongue; receptors and the taste particles are like LEGOs, once a certain taste particle fits in a groove, our brains will receive messages from the complex to identify the taste. Combinations of tastes will cause changes of taste intensity levels due to the interactions between different tastes (Keast and Breslin, 2002). Our taste buds get easier to detect sweetness when the sweet taste is presented along with low to moderate concentration of sour taste, so that we are able to taste a more pleasant sour and sweet taste in lots of foods (Keast and Breslin,

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

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.

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

Scientist have broken down these words into four basic categories on the tongue: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. For years, it was believed that specific taste receptors were concentrated in different areas of the tongue. Sweet—pleasurable sensation—receptors were plentiful near the tip of the tongue. Sour—acidity—receptors occurred along the lateral edges of the tongue. Salt—sodium ions—receptors were abundant in the tip and upper portion of the tongue and bitter—unpleasant, sharp, or disagreeable—receptors were at the back of the tongue. However this theory was subsequently disproved, partially because of the discovery of umami. With its recognition, all tastes can be experienced all over the tongue.

	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."

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.

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