Hawkmoths guide their long tongues to flowers using "eye-hand" coordination, just like you use your eyes to guide your hands.
bioRxiv · March 13, 2026 · 10.64898/2026.01.27.702022
Why it matters
This reveals that complex, lateralized motor control—where an eye and an appendage are locked in a shared reference frame—is not just a vertebrate trait. It shows a striking convergence in how totally different nervous systems solve the problem of aiming at a target.
From the abstract
Lateralization of behaviour, including motor control and sensory processing, is widespread across bilaterians. In visually guided tasks it often manifests as an axis aligning eye, appendage, and a target within a shared reference frame, such as eye-hand coordination in humans or eye-beak coordination in birds. While studied intensively in a few vertebrate systems, whether similar control principles apply to invertebrates, and more generally, how sensory and motor lateralization are linked mechan