Bogong trace copper (infuses
Bogong moths migrate hundreds of kilometers every year – using the southern night sky as a compass.
All spring, thousands of millions of bogong moths (Agrotis Infusa) Migrate hundreds of kilometers to the south to the Australian Alps, guided by the Austral Night Skit.
The discovery that they can find their way Using only the starsreported in a published last week in the journal Nature, makes this moth the first invertebrate to be observed using heavenly navigation for long -range travel.
“The first time we saw them fly under the night sky without any other track and flying in the right direction we had to grab ourselves by the table,” the study co-author Eric Warrantentomologist at the University of Lund in Sweden.
Bogong moths emerge from their cocoons in southeastern Australia and some regions of New Zealand and start a long flight to mountainous caves who never visited before.
In the next fall, these moths make the return flight to reproduce and die. “How do you know how to find the way there? Warrant asks.
Warrant and his team suspected that these moths were oriented during the flight looking at the starsa capacity previously identified only in humans, birds and possibly focus.
To test this theory, they captured wild moths and put them in a ‘flight simulator’-a transparent cylindrical box in which insects were tied and their movements recorded while projections of the starry sky were shown.
The researchers manipulated the magnetic field in the simulator to observe if the moths They were able to navigate without this track. They also registered the activity of visual neurons in the brains of the moths to investigate whether they have an internal representation of the starry sky.
When the moths They had no access to the projection of the sky or to the electromagnetic field, they were completely unable to navigate.
But with access only to the visual track of the stars, they managed to sail the seasonally appropriate direction. They could also fly in the correct direction in the presence of a Electromagnetic field, but without visible stars.
Ter these two internal ‘compasses’ functional allows moths to navigate adverse conditionslike Night cloudy skies that obscure the stars, or during magnetic storms, the researchers say.
The team too identified visual neurons Inside the brain of the moth that respond to characteristics of the sky, including the shape of the Milky Way.
“What was exciting For me it was that these are neurons that we had not seen before, ”he says Andrea adsneuroscience researcher at the Francis Crick Institute in London and co-author of the study.
“It is surprising that an insect with a brain smaller than a grain of rice be able to do this, ”he says Basil El Jundi, Biologist at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, who was not involved in the study.
One way for future investigation will be to see how Bogong moths can integrate visual and electromagnetic clues together. “Even a very small nervous system is amazing things“Says Warren.
