Getting food can be tough for all sorts of animals, but the hawkmoth has a particular challenge. It feeds at dusk by inserting a long proboscis into a flower to drink nectar.

Simon Sponberg, an assistant professor in the physics department at Georgia Tech, who reported on the moth’s visual abilities last week in Science, said the moths must maintain a hovering position, “while they’re feeding from a flower with a proboscis that can be as long as their body while the flower is moving in the wind.”

They need to see that flower clearly. And they are “doing it at light levels at which we’d have trouble seeing the hand in front of our face,” Dr. Sponberg said.

He along with Thomas L. Daniel, with whom he studied the moths at the University of Washington before moving to Georgia Tech, and colleagues reported that one of the ways the moths seem to cope with near darkness is to slow visual processing in their brains.