Meeting Abstract
Many species of birds, butterflies, and moths fly hundreds and even thousands of miles and feed almost exclusively on nectar. Migratory and hovering flight are energetically demanding and result in high levels of oxidative damage. How nectar feeding animals mitigate this damage is not well known. In this study, we show that the Carolina Sphinx Moth (Manduca sexta), a model nectarivores, shunts glucose from nectar to the pentose phosphate pathway (PPP); this produces the antioxidant potential as NADPH and reduced glutathione, which are used to reduce oxidative damage to muscle cell membranes due to the intense flight. We propose that consumption of carbohydrate-rich nectar, the intense demands of flight, and the use of the PPP are causally linked and that this linkage has enabled the evolution of nectarivores’ extreme metabolically demanding modes of locomotion, including hovering and migratory flight. This linkage also has broader implications as it may explain how other organisms that feed on carbohydrate-rich foods can minimize oxidative damage due to high aerobic metabolic activity
