While hovering or flying hard, how many times per minute can a hummingbird's heart beat?
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🐘 Animals · beats per minute
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Answer
About 1,200 beats per minute
To survive cold nights, hummingbirds enter torpor, letting their heart rate fall to around 50 beats per minute and their body temperature drop sharply.
How to estimate it
Heart rate falls with body size, roughly as the fourth root of mass. A 70 kg human rests at 70 beats per minute. A hummingbird weighs about 4 grams, 17,500 times less, and the fourth root of 17,500 is about 11.5. 70 × 11.5 = 800 beats per minute, and hard flight pushes that higher still. Measured peaks reach about 1,200 beats per minute.
Source: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Smithsonian National Zoo
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