name: Hummingbird hawk moth (Macroglossum stellar)
Where do you live: Europe and North Africa, and migrate north in summer and south in winter
What does he eat: nectar
Why it's cool: – It's a bird! No, it's the hawkmoth hummingbird! This adorable creature looks like a hummingbird, but is actually a butterfly. They even hover in a way reminiscent of hummingbirds, flapping their wings so fast that they produce an audible hum — a striking example of convergent evolution.
It beats its wings about 85 times per second, more than some species of hummingbirds, according to the Verge website. nature of bbs.
The hummingbird hawkmoth prefers flowers with tubular-shaped petals and uses its long, twisted proboscis—an elongated mouthpart—to extract nectar from the center of the flower. Its proboscis is almost the entire length of the body and is kept coiled when not in use.
One of the most notable aspects of the hummingbird moth is its vision. Unlike most insects, this moth relies on its eyes to precisely locate its giant proboscis in the center of flowers.
Let us imagine how difficult it is for a hawkmoth to maneuver its large limb with a hummingbird. Anna Stockl at the University of Konstanz in Germany, whose research focuses on how animals see the world, likes to imagine a human trying to move a straw sticking out of their mouth into a cup — and the straw just happens to be as long as they are, she said. Live sciences.
Related: A large moth with a wingspan of 10 inches is rarely seen in an Australian school
In a study published on January 29 in the journal With peopleStockel and her colleagues used high-speed cameras to photograph hawkmoths hovering next to artificial flowers with different patterns on them. They realized that hawkmoths were using constant visual feedback to adjust their movements along the patterns and ensure that the proboscis reached the center of the pattern, where the nectar should be.
Visually guided reaching requires a fairly sophisticated neural circuit, which is why it is more widespread in mammals. However, hummingbird moths show that they are also capable of performing this complex behavior even with their relatively simple nervous systems.
“Using vision to guide the appendix is really something we don't find very often in insects,” Stockl said. “So to have a potential example of an insect orienting a very unusual appendix using vision was really exciting.”
