Animals are driven to move, seek food resources, or find mates based upon their physiological needs at a given time. These physiological needs are embedded in biochemical changes within the animal. In collaboration with the Core Facilities at Georgia Tech, this project seeks to understand how biochemical changes in the brain and the thorax of […]
Animals perform a plethora of robust, agile movements in natural environments by actuating and coordinating many muscles. However, the nervous system has a limited set of signals—action potentials in motor neurons—to control and execute these movements. Hawk moths use an especially sparse set of motor commands, with only 10 muscles controlling all wing movements, and […]
Current quasi-steady models of insect flight often prescribe constant body dynamics during a wingstroke. However, many silkmoths and butterflies experience large fluctuations in body kinematics even during a single wingstroke. We know that silkmoths use larger, slower wingstrokes than their cousin hawkmoths, which are common models for insect flight. But how do silkmoth’s morphology and […]
A wide diversity of wing shapes has evolved, but how is aerodynamic strategy coupled to morphological variation? Here we examine how wing shape has evolved across a phylogenetic split between hawkmoths (Sphingidae) and wild silkmoths (Saturniidae), which have divergent life histories, but agile flight behaviors. We use measurements of both wing morphology and movement to […]
Plants and their pollinators must interact with changing airflow while simultaneously interacting as individual organisms. For flying pollinators, this includes flight through gusts and performing complex aerial maneuvers. Recent studies have begun to explore how these animals alter behavior in response to unsteady air, but we do not know if these conditions represent the local […]
The leading-edge vortex (LEV) is a well-known flight mechanism used by flapping insects, but the interplay between the bound LEV and the flexible wing it attaches to is not yet understood. On rigid wings, the LEV bursts but remains attached at Re~O(103), however this has not been seen on flexible insect wings in the same […]
Animals such as cockroaches must coordinate the movements of multiple legs, which are coupled components of a complex hybrid-dynamical system, in order to stably run. Coordination could be achieved through a decentralized control architecture, where a motor command for a particular muscle is only informative of the variation of the local states of the limb, […]
Hawkmoths naturally hover and feed from flowers in nature. Insects have developed an assortment of unsteady aerodynamic mechanisms to generate the high-lift necessary for hovering. While feeding, hawkmoths rely on precise wing kinematics to not only remain aloft, but also track the motion of flowers as they sway in the wind. Previous work revealed that […]
Hawkmoths, like Manduca sexta, hover and track moving flowers during natural foraging in low light environments. Neural recordings from the visual part of the moth’s brain have suggested that as light levels drop, the moth changes its sensitivity to light by integrating light for a longer period of time. Such a strategy raises the possibility […]
Once a behaving organism has acquired, processed, and transmitted sensory information it must still alter patterns of motor activation in a manner that enables control. A central challenge in understanding motor control, particularly during complex rhythmic behaviors like flight, is decoding the specific features of body dynamics that are control by patterns of neural feedback […]