Extended Data Fig. 5: Reanalysis of the tactile response in crepuscular hawkmoth, Manduca sexta²⁰, and active exploratory movement of three different species of hawkmoths during flower tracking¹⁹ shows similar broad-shouldered velocity distributions.

(a-f) Histograms of relative radial angular velocity for different shape of the flower as indicated. ‘C’ is the curvature parameter for the description of the lateral traces of the corollas for first (a-c) and seventh (d-f, early-learning) visit. The magenta dashed and the blue solid curves in (d) correspond to a normal and GMM fit with three components, respectively. The kurtosis (κ) values and the total number of trajectories (N) analyzed are indicated next to the respective panels in (a-f). The dataset analyzed here was collected at 100 Hz. For the present study, we focused on the data during the pre-feeding phases only. (g-l) Histograms of active exploratory velocity at low (g-i: 15 lx) and high (j-l: 300 lx) illumination level in three different species of hawkmoth-nocturnal Deilephila elpenor (g,j), diurnal Macroglossum stellatarum (h,k), and crepuscular Manduca sexta (i,l). Colors of the fits are same as in (a-f). The kurtosis (κ) values and the total number of hawkmoths (N) analyzed are indicated. (m-o) Box and whisker plots showing the RMS active exploratory velocity for all three species of hawkmoths analyzed at different illumination levels. All box and whisker plots include the median line, the box denotes the interquartile range (IQR), whiskers denote the rest of the data distribution and outliers are denoted by points greater than ± 1.5 × IQR. Sample sizes (n) are shown in each boxplot. The one-sided p-values were computed using the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test. The datasets analyzed here were collected at 100 Hz with one trial per hawkmoth (N = n).