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About the Cover
Cover: The hawkmoth Manduca sexta is a nocturnal forager. Often hovering in windy conditions, it feeds on the nectar of night-blooming flowers that are set against a spatially complex and dim visual background. This exquisite flight control emerges from the fusion of signals from a diverse array of sensory modalities. Mark Frye (pp. 3683-3691 and 3693--3702) shows that a mechanoreceptor of the wing hinge encodes specific wing kinematics and that this feedback is integrated with visual cues to control flight behaviour. As the moth tracks a moving visual pattern during flight, microsurgical ablation of this proprioceptive organ results in a reduced wingstroke amplitude (the inset shows ablation data in red) and resultant flight forces. Photograph courtesy of Michael S. Tu.
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