Elephant Hawkmoth

Fascinating facts about the Elephant Hawkmoth

• Elephant hawk moths see colour in the dark. Their dark-adapted eyes contain three visual pigments tuned to 345 nm (ultraviolet), 440 nm (blue) and 520 nm (green), and all three remain functional at low light, giving them true scotopic colour vision. This was the first documented case of night colour vision in any animal, letting the moth locate the right flower and hover over it, a visually demanding task that fuels its nocturnal feeding.
• When the moth hovers to sip nectar, its flight speed can reach 4.5-5.1 m/s. Yet even that power can't overcome a gentle breeze: once wind reaches 3.0 m/s the moth abandons flower visits altogether. Its mastery of hovering, backed by spatial-cue processing and motion-detecting neurons, lets it feed without landing, but wind quickly erodes the energy budget that makes that skill worthwhile.
• A fully grown elephant hawk moth caterpillar can stretch up to 3 inches (7.62 cm) long and weigh between 4.0 and 7.5 grams (0.14-0.26 oz). Over its brief larval life it devours a staggering 11-30 grams (0.39-1.06 oz) of plant material, turning the modest garden into a buffet.
• Elephant hawk moths are night-time pollinators, visiting flowers that open at twilight or after dark. Their activity helps pollinate roughly 5-10 % of the tree and shrub species in the habitats they roam, a surprisingly high share for a single insect group. By feeding while hovering, they transfer pollen across grasslands, woodlands and even city gardens.
• Until the 1980s the moth lived only in Scotland's southern half, but it has since marched north along the coast and onto the mainland.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these pages, and kept only where one of them states it.

• Wikipedia

At a glance

About the Elephant Hawkmoth

As the sun dips below the horizon, the Elephant Hawkmoth stirs, its powdery pink wings unfolding like delicate petals as it takes to the evening air. With a gentle, lilting beat, it dances through the shadows, its feathery antennae twitching as it navigates the sweet-scented realm of blooming flowers, its long, extendable proboscis uncoiling like a ghostly tendril to sip nectar from the depths of tubular blooms. In this fleeting, crepuscular world, the Elephant Hawkmoth reigns, a soft-focused monarch of the twilight, its very existence a whispered promise of beauty and wonder.

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