Sensory biology. Flower discrimination by pollinators in a dynamic chemical environment.

Pollinators use their sense of smell to locate flowers from long distances, but little is known about how they are able to discriminate their target odor from a mélange of other natural and anthropogenic odors. Here, we measured the plume from Datura wrightii flowers, a nectar resource for Manduca sexta moths, and show that the scent was dynamic and rapidly embedded among background odors. The moth's ability to track the odor was dependent on the background and odor frequency.

Wireless stimulation of antennal muscles in freely flying hawkmoths leads to flight path changes.

Insect antennae are sensory organs involved in a variety of behaviors, sensing many different stimulus modalities. As mechanosensors, they are crucial for flight control in the hawkmoth Manduca sexta. One of their roles is to mediate compensatory reflexes of the abdomen in response to rotations of the body in the pitch axis.

Relative stereociliary motion in a hair bundle opposes amplification at distortion frequencies.

Direct gating of mechanoelectrical transduction channels by mechanical force is a basic feature of hair cells that assures fast transduction and underpins the mechanical amplification of acoustic inputs, but the associated non-linearity - the gating compliance - inevitably distorts signals. Because reducing distortion would make the ear a better detector, we sought mechanisms with that effect. Mimicking in vivo stimulation, we used stiff probes to displace individual hair bundles at physiological amplitudes and measured the coherence and phase of the relative stereociliary motions with a dual-beam differential interferometer.

Antennae in the hawkmoth Manduca sexta (Lepidoptera, Sphingidae) mediate abdominal flexion in response to mechanical stimuli.

Flying insects rely on the integration of feedback signals from multiple sensory modalities. Thus, in addition to the visual input, mechanosensory information from antennae is crucial for stable flight in the hawkmoth Manduca sexta. However, the nature of compensatory reflexes mediated by mechanoreceptors on the antennae is unknown.