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 […]
The function of a visual system is to condense and transform patterns of light into a form that is meaningful to the rest of the brain and that can also be propagated to enable movement. Interestingly, how a moving visual scene is processed by the nervous system can look differently depending upon whether the animal […]
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 […]
Approximately 360 million years ago, tetrapods colonized the terrestrial environment. This water-to-land transition is marked by a suite of behavioral and morphological adaptations. Among these was the origin of blinking—the occlusion of the eye by one of more membranes. Blinking behaviors cover the cornea is a fluid film, which is important for epithelial cell health, […]
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 […]
