Hummingbird hawk-moth: The bird-like insect with a giant sucking mouthpart
Just as humans rely on their eyes to make precise movements with their hands, hummingbird hawk-moths use continuous visual feedback to precisely position their proboscis in the center of flowers.
This fascinating creature looks like a hummingbird, but it’s actually a moth. Name: Hummingbird hawk-moth (Macroglossum stellatarum) Where it lives: Europe and North Africa, migrating north in summer and south in winter What it eats: Nectar Why it’s awesome: — It’s a bird! No, it’s a hummingbird hawk-moth! This fascinating creature looks like a hummingbird, but it’s actually a moth. It even hovers in a way reminiscent of hummingbirds, with its wings fluttering so fast they produce an audible hum — a striking example of convergent evolution. It beats its wings around 85 times per second — more than some species of hummingbird, according to PBS Nature.
The hummingbird hawk-moth is partial to flowers with tube-shaped petals and uses its long, curled proboscis — an elongated sucking mouthpart — to extract nectar from the flower’s center. Its proboscis is almost as long as its entire body and is kept curled up when not in use.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the hummingbird hawk-moth is its vision. Unlike most insects, this moth depends on its eyes to precisely position its giant proboscis in the center of the flowers. To imagine how difficult it is for a hummingbird hawk-moth to maneuver its large appendage, Anna Stöckl 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 glass — and the straw happens to be as tall as them, she told Live Science.
In a study published Jan. 29 in the journal PNAS, Stöckl and her colleagues used high-speed cameras to film hawk-moths as they hovered next to artificial flowers with different patterns on them. They realized that the hawk-moths were using continuous visual feedback to fine-tune their movements along the patterns and make sure that the proboscis reached the center of the pattern, where the nectar should be.
Related: Rarely seen supersized moth with 10-inch wingspan found at Australian school In a study published Jan. 29 in the journal PNAS, Stöckl and her colleagues used high-speed cameras to film hawk-moths as they hovered next to artificial flowers with different patterns on them. They realized that the hawk-moths were using continuous visual feedback to fine-tune their movements along the patterns and make sure that the proboscis reached the center of the pattern, where the nectar should be.
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