ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Into rude air: hummingbird flight performance in variable aerial environments.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Habitat-Specific Design Strategies for Untethered Soft Robots.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Review
- Passive mechanisms in flying insects and applications in bio-inspired flapping-wing micro air vehicles.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Physical and biological effects on moths' navigation performance.Movement ecology · 2025Article
- Morphological evolution of bird wings follows a mechanical sensitivity gradient determined by the aerodynamics of flapping flight.Nature communications · 2023Article
- A low-cost wind tunnel for bird flight experiments.Journal of ornithology · 2022Article
- Natural barriers: waterfall transit by small flying animals.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Living in a trash can: turbulent convective flows impairJournal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2018Article
- Foraging in an unsteady world: bumblebee flight performance in field-realistic turbulence.Interface focus · 2017Article
- Moving in a moving medium: new perspectives on flight.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Hummingbirds are well known for their ability to sustain hovering flight, but many other remarkable features of manoeuvrability characterize the more than 330 species of trochilid. Most research on hummingbird flight has been focused on either forward flight or hovering in otherwise non-perturbed air. In nature, however, hummingbirds fly through and must compensate for substantial environmental perturbation, including heavy rain, unpredictable updraughts and turbulent eddies. Here, we review recent studies on hummingbirds flying within challenging aerial environments, and discuss both the direct and indirect effects of unsteady environmental flows such as rain and von Kármán vortex streets. Both perturbation intensity and the spatio-temporal scale of disturbance (expressed with respect to characteristic body size) will influence mechanical responses of volant taxa. Most features of hummingbird manoeuvrability remain undescribed, as do evolutionary patterns of flight-related adaptation within the lineage. Trochilid flight performance under natural conditions far exceeds that of microair vehicles at similar scales, and the group as a whole presents many research opportunities for understanding aerial manoeuvrability.This article is part of the themed issue 'Moving in a moving medium: new perspectives on flight'.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.