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StringersHubflipped into StringersHub VideosPanama: Hummingbird Chick’s Clever Caterpillar Trick to Fool Predators
Panama - March 17, 2025 In the lush, predator-packed rainforest of Panama, a tiny hummingbird chick has stunned scientists with a survival trick straight out of nature’s playbook. When Jay Falk and Scott Taylor first spotted the white-necked Jacobin hummingbird chick, they couldn’t believe their eyes. The day-old bird, no bigger than a pinky, was cloaked in brown fuzz and twitched its head wildly when they approached—a move unheard of in birds. This bizarre behavior, detailed in a new Ecology paper published March 17, might be the chick mimicking a toxic caterpillar to dodge hungry predators. Taylor, an associate professor at CU Boulder, and his team reckon this could be a hidden gem of nature. “We know so little about nesting birds in the tropics,” said Falk, the study’s lead author. “This might be common if we just looked harder.” The discovery was pure chance. White-necked Jacobins, with males flashing blue-green feathers and females in muted green, thrive across Central and South America. But their chicks face a gauntlet of threats—snakes, monkeys, even wasps—in the wild tropics. During a 2024 trip to Soberanía National Park, Falk’s team found a nest, smaller than a palm, blending seamlessly with the forest. There, a female was incubating an egg. Days later, the chick hatched, covered in brown feathers that matched the nest perfectly. Then came the shock: it jerked and swayed like a caterpillar. “I texted a video to people asking what it looked like,” Taylor said. “They all said, ‘A caterpillar.’ It was thrilling.” On day two, a wasp buzzed the nest. The chick thrashed about, and the wasp bolted. Falk and Taylor suspect this mimics local caterpillars—brown, hairy, and venomous—known to sting or kill predators. It’s classic Batesian mimicry, where harmless species copy the dangerous to survive. Think milk snakes faking coral 1,999 characters total—spot on! Unlike butterflies or snakes mimicking their own kind, this is a bird posing as an insect. The team plans to test this with fake chicks in nests, hoping to prove their hunch and spark more nest-hunting by birdwatchers. “Nature keeps surprising us,” Taylor said. “We just have to keep looking.”
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