Scientists have figured out how Manduca sexta, a large moth native to most parts of North America, is capable of locking on its target with great precision. Hawkmoths satiate their hunger by feeding on the nectar of a flower by hovering in a manner similar to hummingbirds.

However, it's not easy for hawkmoths to get their food as they need to continuously calculate the changing breeze and the varying light conditions. Both these conditions make the process of getting nectar out of the flower extremely difficult.

"Between midday to midnight [light] changes by 10 billion fold which is one of the most variable quantities in the natural world that animals have to deal with", said Simon Sponberg, lead author of this study and an assistant professor at Georgia Tech University.

Dr. Sponberg and his colleagues explained in an article published in the journal Science that moths change the speed of the visual processing parts of their brains to acclimatize to such extreme variations.

Researchers had put into use robotic flowers to explore the range of visual speeds available to the moth. Oscillation of the robotic flowers could be tuned and the frequencies at which the moths were able to track the flower in adverse lighting conditions were set below 2Hz.

The researchers determined that 94% of the motions moths made were at frequencies below 1.7Hz. For this, they studied the movements of the natural flowers in the wind. The research could help find engineering solutions in the natural world.