Slow-flapping (also called synchronous) insects use their nervous system to tell the wings how fast to flap. This is how your muscles work as well – muscle contraction is synchronous with a neural signal to the desired muscle. Unfortunately, this mode of actuation does not scale past 100 contractions per second, due to fundamental tradeoffs […]
Continue reading Evolutionary transitions in flight muscle physiology
Centimeter-scale flapping flight is an extremely power-intensive way to get around, because it requires powerful, muscle-driven movement at high frequencies. The fastest insects flap their wings at nearly 1000 times per second! Since the discovery of elasticity in the insect thorax, it has been thought that insects flap at their resonant frequency to fly efficiently, […]
Continue reading Do insects flap at their resonant frequency?
One aspect of flight agility of hawkmoth M. sexta is that it sustains long bouts of hovering mid-air while feeding from wind-blowing flowers. Interestingly, this flower tracking phenomenon turns out to be linear i.e. it emerges as a linear relationship between flower and moth positions for a range of speeds close to the hover-feeding equilibrium […]
Continue reading What underlies the emergent agility of hawkmoth flower tracking
Animal locomotion poses many challenges to an animal’s sensorimotor processing, especially for goal-directed tasks in dynamic and uncertain environments. To understand these challenges, some neural network models can predict firing rates or other continuous representations of neural parameters or can classify sensory stimuli and motor responses. These models are integrated with traditional motor control models […]
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 […]
Continue reading Determining the biochemical changes associated with feeding and flight
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 […]
Continue reading How an ecologically-relevant odor affects visual motion processing
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 […]
Continue reading Temporal encoding across a motor program for the hawkmoth’s agile flight
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 […]
Continue reading within-wingstroke body motion affect on insect flight dynamics
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 […]
Continue reading The evolution of different strategies for agile flight
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, […]
Continue reading The convergent evolution of blinking in mudskippers and tetrapods
