Meeting Abstract
The coevolution of flowering plants and their insect pollinators has led to rapid diversification in both groups. Plants have evolved species-specific visual and olfactory cues to attract insects and insects use these sensory cues to identify and navigate to a host plant. Although these roles of vision and olfaction underlying plant-pollinator interactions has received much interest, surprisingly little is known about the contribution of mechanosensation in shaping this interaction. By combining behavioral analyses of moths (Manduca sexta) feeding from 3D printed flowers along with SEM and X-ray microtomography, we aim to understand how insects extract this tactile information and which mechanosensors contribute to this ecologically relevant behavior. Indeed, recent work has shown that mechanical information is at least as salient as visual information in guiding the ability of moths to track moving flowers, once they are engaged with the nectary. However, before moths even fully engage with a flower, they unfurl their coiled, straw-like proboscis as they approach the flower. Hovering over the flower, the moth probes the surface with its proboscis. Morphological features such as mechanical grooves on the flower could serve as nectary guides. Moreover, floral shape (curvature, size of nectary opening) also profoundly affects feeding performance. However, how moths use tactile cues to find the nectary location and where this mechanosensation occurs remains largely unknown. We used 3D printed flowers of differing morphologies to explore the relationship between floral shape and nectary exploitation. We found that, over repeated trials, moths became increasingly efficient at locating the nectary. Moreover, this process depends on floral morphology. These results point to a capacity of moths to use active exploration in learning the flower shape.
