Dreyer David, Adden Andrea, Chen Hui, Frost Barrie, Mouritsen Henrik, Xu Jingjing, Green Ken, Whitehouse Mary, Chahl Javaan, Wallace Jesse, Hu Gao, Foster James, Heinze Stanley, Warrant Eric
Lund Vision Group, Department of Biology, University of Lund, Lund, Sweden.
Neural Circuits and Evolution Laboratory, The Francis Crick Institute, London, UK.
Nature. 2025 Jun 18. doi: 10.1038/s41586-025-09135-3.
Each spring, billions of Bogong moths escape hot conditions across southeast Australia by migrating up to 1,000 km to a place that they have never previously visited-a limited number of cool caves in the Australian Alps, historically used for aestivating over summer. At the beginning of autumn, the same individuals make a return migration to their breeding grounds to reproduce and die. Here we show that Bogong moths use the starry night sky as a compass to distinguish between specific geographical directions, thereby navigating in their inherited migratory direction towards their distant goal. By tethering spring and autumn migratory moths in a flight simulator, we found that, under naturalistic moonless night skies and in a nulled geomagnetic field (disabling the moth's known magnetic sense), moths flew in their seasonally appropriate migratory directions. Visual interneurons in different regions of the moth's brain responded specifically to rotations of the night sky and were tuned to a common sky orientation, firing maximally when the moth was headed southwards. Our results suggest that Bogong moths use stellar cues and the Earth's magnetic field to create a robust compass system for long-distance nocturnal navigation towards a specific destination.
每年春天，数十亿只博贡蛾会逃离澳大利亚东南部炎热的环境，迁徙长达1000公里，前往一个它们从未去过的地方——澳大利亚阿尔卑斯山数量有限的凉爽洞穴，这些洞穴在历史上一直被用于夏季夏眠。秋季伊始，同样的个体又会回迁到它们的繁殖地进行繁殖，直至死亡。我们在此表明，博贡蛾利用繁星点点的夜空作为指南针来辨别特定的地理方向，从而朝着它们遗传的迁徙方向飞向遥远的目的地。通过将春季和秋季迁徙的蛾子拴在飞行模拟器中，我们发现，在自然的无月夜天空下以及在消除了地磁场的环境中（使蛾子已知的磁感失效），蛾子会朝着与其季节相适应的迁徙方向飞行。蛾子大脑不同区域的视觉中间神经元对夜空的旋转有特定反应，并被调整到一个共同的天空方向，当蛾子朝南飞行时，它们的放电最为强烈。我们的研究结果表明，博贡蛾利用恒星线索和地球磁场创建了一个强大的指南针系统，用于在夜间长途导航至特定目的地。
