Printed flowers unravel moth mystery
7 May 2015 by Evoluted New Media
By using artificial flowers, ecologists have found that flower shape affects the foraging behaviour of hawk moths.
A research team at the University of Washington used 3D printing to make artificial flowers and found that Manduca sexta– a species of hawk moth – feed better from curved-shaped flowers.
“3D printing is a unique opportunity to explore the interactions between floral form and pollinator performance,” said Eric Campos, a PhD student at the University of Washington.
In the study, published in the British Ecological Society’s journalFunctional Ecology, the scientists created flowers of two different shapes: one curved like a trumpet; and a flat disc with a hole in the centre. The team then filled each artificial flower with sugar water to simulate the nectar of real flowers and allowed hawk moths to fly freely around the flowers for five minutes.
Results from the experiment showed that the moths fed more successfully from the curved flowers rather than the flat ones. Also, the ecologists believe that nocturnal species like Manduca sexta use touch as opposed to sight to locate nectar.
Dr Campos said: “With their long proboscis and nocturnal habits, finding a flower’s nectar source isn’t easy for the fist-sized hawk moths we used in our study. Imagine being given a garden hose that’s almost twice your height in length. Now imagine trying to thread the other end through a hole that’s scarcely wider than the hose itself – at dusk as the sun is setting or at night during a full moon. It may seem like a silly proposition, but it’s not too far off from what night-flying hawk moths have to contend with to get a meal.”
The team believes that using 3D printing to make artificial flowers will allow ecologists to study animal pollinators, who are the key organisms for fertilisation of plants.
“Such studies can help elucidate the details of how pollinator visitation influences the evolution of floral shape in nature, and the extent to which floral forms are the result of specialisations between one plant and one pollinator species,” Dr Campos said.
