If there is something that biologists did not expect to discover is that billions of moths look at the stars to orient

Imagine having to travel a thousand kilometers to a place where you have never been. Now imagine you have to do it at night, without GPS, or maps of any kind. To finish curling the curl, imagine that you only have one chance in your life to do so. You don’t have to imagine it because we are not talking about a person, but of moths.

The annual pilgrimage of the Bogong moths. This is the feat that billions of Bogong moths (Infusa agrotis) They perform every year in Australia. And scientists have just discovered that they are oriented looking at the stars.

This discovery, Posted in Nature magazineconverts the Bogong moth in the first insect of which you have a record that uses a stellar compass for long -distance navigation, a skill that until now was believed reserved for animals such as some night migratory birds.

The trip of a life. Each southern spring, these moths undertake one of up to a thousand kiometers. They hatch in the warm plains of southeastern Australia and fly towards a handful of cold caves in the Australian Alps to spend the summer (a process called Estivation). When the fall arrives, those same moths undertake the trip back to their breeding areas to reproduce and, finally, die.

The big question that has fascinated biologists for years is how they do it. No one teaches them the way. It is a round trip that each individual performs only once. A team of researchers, led by David Dreyer from the University of Lund, had already demonstrated in 2018 that the moths were sensitive to the magnetic field of the earth, Like other animalsbut they suspected there was something else. They had their eyes on the sky.

A planetarium for moths. To confirm your hypothesis, The team designed an ingenious experiment. They captured migration during their migration and introduced them into a flight simulator. This device, similar to a small planetarium, held the moth allowing him to beat the wings and turn freely, while a sensor recorded his flight address. The team did several tests:

1. They canceled the magnetic field: using a coil system, they created an environment without magnetic clues. Thus they made sure that any correct orientation was due to visual signals.
2. They projected a natural starry sky: under an artificial night sky, identical to the one they would see in the time of migration, the moths were oriented persistently in their correct migratory direction: to the south in spring and north in autumn.
3. They turned the sky 180 degrees: In the final test, the researchers rotated the projection of the starry sky 180 degrees. The response of the moths was immediate and amazing: they invested their flight direction almost exactly 180 degrees.
4. They project random stars: to make sure they did not respond simply to the light, they projected an image with the same amount of stars and brightness, but randomly distributed, without forming recognizable patterns. In this situation, the moths flew disoriented, without a clear direction.

Unexpected. These results demonstrated without a doubt that the moths not only see the stars, but use them as a true compass to maintain a specific geographical direction for thousands of kilometers.

It was already known that other insects, such as players, use the Milky Way to orient. However, they do it to move in a straight line and quickly move away from a lot of manure, a short -term orientation and without a fixed destination.

The achievement of the Bogong moth is much more complex. Use the stars to “discern specific geographical directions” and sail towards a “distant objective”, something radically different and much more sophisticated.

A brain connected to the stars. The researchers did not stop in behavior. They also analyzed the brain of the moths and discovered visual neurons that responded specifically to the rotation of the starry sky. Interestingly, these neurons showed their maximum activity when the moth was heading south, regardless of whether it was spring or autumn, which suggests that they have a wiring neuronal system to detect a fundamental light blue orientation.

This does not invalidate its magnetic compass. In another experiment, the scientists observed that on completely cloudy nights, when the stars were invisible, the moths were still oriented correctly. The conclusion is that the Bogong moth has an incredibly robust and redundant navigation system. It uses both the Earth’s magnetic field and a stellar compass, probably using a system to calibrate the other or to take over when one of the two fails.

There are still mysteries to solve, such as what stars or exact constellations use or how they compensate for the rotation of the earth throughout the night. But what is clear is that not only the ancient sailors looked at the stars to find their way. A tiny insect, on his only trip, also does.

Image | Pexels

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