Hummingbirds have been thought to drink by capillary action, the process of a fluid rising into a narrow tube due to forces attracting the liquid, since the 1830’s. That is up until recently.

A new study has scientists trying to figure out once and for all if the hummingbird’s tongue does function as they have thought over the past two centuries, or were they wrong, according to Rapid News Network.

“It’s payment for the hummingbird to come frequently enough so that they will go off and act as pollinators to other flowers of the same species.”

They have discovered that the tongue of a hummingbird works like a micro-pump method of feeding. The filling mechanism of the tongue uses elastic recovery properties of the groove walls to load the nectar into the tongue-tip reservoir. Since their tongues flick in and out about 14 times per second, it allows them to extract nectar in large magnitudes. As soon as the tongue hits the nectar, it springs back, putting into motion a suction that fills their tongue reservoir in milliseconds.

Even in the science world that is filled with unique body parts, and tongues, the hummingbird’s is a rather extraordinary example. And with this further knowledge of how their tongues really do work, it could lead scientists to propel their studies further around the micro-pump method of feeding and go back to review previous research.

The pump-style of gathering nectar is called elastic energy, scientists said, a potential mechanical energy stored by the flattening of the tongue.

The findings discovered by these scientists were published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences this week. Their findings of that the hummingbird does not use a vacuum-method to generate suction, rather more like a tiny pump, will unravel decades of previous research to be re-visited.