Hummingbird hawk-moth: The bird-like insect with a giant sucking mouthpart

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Hummingbird hawk-moth: The bird-like insect with a giant sucking mouthpart
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Rohini Subrahmanyam is a scientist-turned science writer with a PhD in Biology and postdoctoral experience in Developmental Biology. She mostly likes writing about interesting creatures on our planet, ranging from zombie flies and regenerating worms, to intelligent octopuses and mysterious comb jellies.

Where it lives: Europe and North Africa, migrating north in summer and south in winterWhy it's awesome: — It's a bird! No, it's a hummingbird hawk-moth! This fascinating creature looks like a hummingbird, but it's actually a moth. It even hovers in a way reminiscent of hummingbirds, with its wings fluttering so fast they produce an audible hum — a striking example of convergent evolution.

The hummingbird hawk-moth is partial to flowers with tube-shaped petals and uses its long, curled proboscis — an elongated sucking mouthpart — to extract nectar from the flower's center. Its proboscis is almost as long as its entire body and is kept curled up when not in use. To imagine how difficult it is for a hummingbird hawk-moth to maneuver its large appendage, Anna Stöckl at the University of Konstanz in Germany, whose research focuses on how animals see the world, likes to imagine a human trying to move a straw sticking out of their mouth into a glass — and the straw happens to be as tall as them, she told Live Science.In a study published Jan.

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