A team of scientists examined the unique ability the hawkmoth has in order to eat during the day and at night.
According to BBC News, Manduca sexta can decrease its brain activity to allow its eyes to see better in the dark. Authors of a study published in the journal Science believe slower thinking may be advantageous for seeing, but could also be harmful in other aspects.
"There has been a lot of interest in understanding how animals deal with challenging sensing environments, especially when they are also doing difficult tasks like hovering in mid-air," Simon Sponberg, an assistant professor in the School of Physics and School of Applied Physiology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said in a press release. "This is also a very significant challenge for micro air vehicles."
To test the moth's cognitive abilities with slower brain activity in a darkened environment, the researchers printed false flowers and filled them with nectar. While their eyes were better suited for dim lighting, the moths tracked random movement from the flowers 17 percent slower than in normal lighting.
But the moths were able to track the flowers at a frequency of 1.7 Hertz and lower, which bodes well for the animal.
"If we want to have robots or machine vision systems that are working under this broad range of conditions, understanding how these moths function under these varying light conditions would be very useful," Sponberg said. "This was an interesting example of how an organism can tune its brain to maintain its ability to gather food.
"The moths do suffer a trade-off by slowing their brains, but that trade-off doesn't end up mattering because it only affects their ability to track movements that don't exist in the natural way that flowers blow in the wind."
