ABSTRACT
Wing integrity is crucial to the many insect species that spend distinct portions of their life in flight. How insects cope with the consequences of wing damage is therefore a central question when studying how robust flight performance is possible with such fragile chitinous wings. It has been shown in a variety of insect species that the loss in lift-force production resulting from wing damage is generally compensated by an increase in wing beat frequency rather than amplitude. The consequences of wing damage for flight performance, however, are less well understood, and vary considerably between species and behavioural tasks. One hypothesis reconciling the varying results is that wing damage might affect fast flight manoeuvres with high acceleration, but not slower ones. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the effect of wing damage on the manoeuvrability of hummingbird hawkmoths (Macroglossum stellatarum) tracking a motorised flower. This assay allowed us to sample a range of movements at different temporal frequencies, and thus assess whether wing damage affected faster or slower flight manoeuvres. We show that hummingbird hawkmoths compensate for the loss in lift force mainly by increasing wing beat amplitude, yet with a significant contribution of wing beat frequency. We did not observe any effects of wing damage on flight manoeuvrability at either high or low temporal frequencies.
Footnotes
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing or financial interests.
Funding
This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology (DBI-1812107) to B.A., an NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award (1554790) to S.S. and grants from the Swedish Research Council (2016-04014) and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-12-1-0237) to E.W.
Author contributions
Conceptualization: K.K., A.L.S.; Methodology: S.S., A.L.S.; Validation: K.K., A.L.S.; Formal analysis: K.K., B.A., S.S., A.L.S.; Investigation: K.K.; Resources: E.J.W., S.S., A.L.S.; Data curation: K.K., A.L.S.; Writing - original draft: A.L.S.; Writing - review & editing: K.K., B.A., E.J.W., S.S., A.L.S.; Visualization: A.L.S.; Supervision: S.S., A.L.S.; Project administration: A.L.S.; Funding acquisition: B.A., E.J.W., S.S.
Data availability
Data supporting the presented results is available in Figshare at: https://figshare.com/s/73ad11df08567ea76d9d. The custom-written MATLAB code used to analyse the data and prepare the figures is available from the corresponding author upon request.
Supplementary information
Supplementary information available online at https://jeb.biologists.org/lookup/doi/10.1242/jeb.236240.supplemental
- Received August 24, 2020.
- Accepted January 13, 2021.
- © 2021. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd
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