The species, Deilephila elpenor, was first named by Carl Linneaus in 1758, but only in 2002 was its color vision discovered. Relying on so few photons for color vision means that elephant hawkmoths are using summation, a process similar to long exposure photography. But Eric Warrant, a vision scientist at Lund University and colleague of Kelber’s, told me that even this might not fully explain nighttime color vision. An elephant hawkmoth was flitting among the honeysuckle flowers, and I tried to get close enough to decipher any color. Powered by their enormous deposits of fat, these birds are essentially “obese super athletes,” as one researcher puts it.