Hawkmoths Maintain a Preferred Side When Visually Guiding Their Proboscis

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Most research on “handedness” (more specifically lateralization) and visually guided movement has focused on vertebrates using paired body parts, such as human hands or birds’ feet. Our study shows that a similar coordination strategy exists in an insect using a single, centrally positioned appendage. By combining high-speed videos, automated movement tracking and experiments that partially blocked one eye, we found that each hawkmoth maintained a stable relationship between its preferred eye, its proboscis, and the part of the flower it was exploring. The work is timely because scientists are increasingly interested in how animals with small nervous systems produce precise and flexible behaviour. Our findings suggest that they may simplify demanding movement tasks by relying on consistent links between seeing and acting, rather than repeatedly calculating movements from every possible position. This broadens our understanding of lateralization beyond familiar vertebrate examples and may reveal general principles of efficient movement control across very different nervous systems. In the longer term, these principles could also inform the design of small robots that must coordinate visual sensors with flexible moving parts using limited computing power.

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